PART I.--LOYAL TOASTS.

_Duke of Edinburgh._--Sailor. Plays the fiddle like an angel. Married to rich Russian Princess. Friend of Sir Arthur Sullivan.

_Duke of Connaught._--First-class Soldier, covered with Egyptian Medals.... His Royal Highness may be called "the heroic and beloved son of our revered Sovereign"--by a provincial Mayor. Name may be introduced in connexion with Ireland, the Franco-German War, Foreign Stocks--"Prefs." and "Unified"--the late Duke of Wellington, and "the Patrol Camp Equipage Hold-all."

_Duke of Albany._--Scientific. Called after the King of the Belgians. Was at Oxford. Connected more or less with South Kensington, Upton Park Road, Bedford Park, the Kyrle Society, and Cremona violins. Is walking in the steps of the late greatly lamented Prince Consort.

_Prince Teck._--Served with distinction as a letter-carrier on the field of Tel-el-Kebir, sold furniture of Kensington Palace by auction, and retired abroad. Name of no great value to anyone.

Here _Punch_, consciously or unconsciously, was satirizing himself in his ceremonial moods. He was on much safer ground in the excellent pictorial burlesque of the life of the Duke of Clarence at Cambridge, based on a series of illustrations in a serious picture-paper in which, amongst other incidents, the Prince had been depicted as "coxing" a racing boat from the bow! This was fair game. There is a spice of malice in the prospectus of an hotel which would supply "a long felt want" by catering at cheap prices for Royal visitors, foreign Princes and potentates, who could not be suitably accommodated in Buckingham Palace. The publication in February, 1884, of a further instalment of "Leaves from her Journal in the Highlands" is claimed as the Queen's Valentine to _Mr. Punch_. When the Duke of Albany died in March, _Punch_ did not err on the side of underestimating the promise and achievement of that estimable Prince, but there is an uncanny resemblance between his graceful elegiac stanzas and the points outlined in the handbook of loyal toasts noted above. For a few months the irresponsible satirist is silent; but he explodes again towards the close of the year over the rumour that the Crown of Brunswick had been offered to the Duke of Cambridge, and that he absolutely refused to resign the command of the British Army. As the rumour was groundless, there was no excuse for _Punch's_ malicious imaginary dialogue between the Duke and the foreign officer who had come to make him the offer. In representing the Duke as being discovered writing an article for the _Sunday Times_ on "Dress," _Punch_ was only reverting to the old familiar gibe at the passionate preoccupation of the Royal Family with tailoring.

[Sidenote: _A Pacific Prince_]

The alternations of candour and cordiality continue in the following year. The Duke of Clarence is heartily congratulated on attaining his majority; and the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Ireland is chronicled in cartoons in which the Prince figures as a stage Irishman, and Erin is seen reproving a sullen little rebel. The Prince of Wales's visit to Berlin in the same year (1885) is hailed as an omen of more pacific relations--the Prince figuring as a Dove, the old Emperor as a friendly Eagle. This was the year in which Princess Beatrice, the youngest of the Queen's daughters, was married to Prince Henry of Battenberg. _Punch_ makes a remarkably frank allusion to the discussions in the House over her marriage portion in May. The passage is interesting not merely for the matter but for the new manner of the "Essence of Parliament," widely different from that of Shirley Brooks:--

_Thursday._ Gladstone moved Resolution allotting Wedding Dowry of six thousand a year to Princess Beatrice. On the whole rather a depressing business. More like a funeral than the preliminary to a wedding party. House listened in politely glum silence. Gladstone seemed to feel this, and laboured along making most of argument that this was the last. Also (being the last) promised Committee for next year to go into whole matter. Labby opposed vote, and O'Brien testified afresh to his disappointment at failure of efforts made to spoil success of Prince of Wales' visit to Ireland. W. Redmond gave the proposal a great fillip by opposing it, and House divided: 337 for making the little present; 38, chiefly Parnellites, against.

By way of set-off, _Punch_ descanted melodiously on the "Royal Ring-Doves," alluding to Princess Beatrice as

England's home-staying daughter, bride, yet bound As with silk ties, within the dear home-round By many a gentle reason.

Here one cannot forget that terrible _Court Journal_ of four years back, or acquit _Punch_ of irony in the light of the fact (recorded in the _Annual Register_) that the Queen only gave her consent to the marriage on condition of Princess Beatrice's living in England. The discomforts and stinginess of the Court are satirized in an acid extract from the "Letter of a Lady-in-Waiting" in January, 1886, and there is a good deal of veiled sarcasm in the long account of the opening of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in the summer. The whole ceremony is made to appear tedious, badly rehearsed and trivial, and the Queen is described as speaking with a "slightly foreign accent." Cordiality revives, however, in the verses "Astræa Redux," on the Queen's "happy restoration to public life," _à propos_ of her visit to Liverpool; and in the reference to her patronage of the Carl Rosa Opera Company at the Lyceum.

[Sidenote: _Punch's Jubilee Ode_]

With the year of the Queen's Golden Jubilee _Punch's_ chivalrous devotion to the person of the sovereign, which had never failed even in his most democratic days, reawakened in full force. In his Jubilee ode he emphasizes throughout the peaceful aim of the celebration:--

Not with the ruthless Roman's proud parade Of flaunting ensigns and of fettered foes, Nor radiantly arrayed In pomp of purple, such as fitly flows From the stern Conqueror's shoulders, comes our Queen Whilst England's ways with June's glad garniture are green.

Not with the scent of battle, or the taint Of cruel carnage round about her car, Making the sick air faint With the dread breath of devastating war, Rolls on our Royal Lady, whilst the shout Of a free people's love compasses her about.

The pageantry that every step attends Is not the martial pomp that tyrants love, No purchased shout of slaves the shamed air rends; Peace's white-pinion'd dove Might perch upon those banners unafraid, The shackled forces here are thralls of Art and Trade.

* * * * *

Triumph! Shall we not triumph who have seen Those fifty years round on from sun to snow, From snow to sun, since when, a girlish Queen In that far June-tide's glow, Your brow first felt that golden weight well-worn, Which tried the Woman's heart, but hath not over-borne?

Fifty fair years which, like to all things fair, Are flecked with shadow, yet whereon the sun Hath never set in shame or in despair, Their changeful course have run. And we who saw the dawn now flock to see June's noonday light illume Victoria's Jubilee.

Just, pure, and gentle, yet of steadfast will When high occasion calls and honour pricks! With such a soul our Commonwealth should thrill, That, that alone shall fix Our rule in rock-like safety, and maintain Free way for England's flag o'er the wind-winnowed main.

And _Punch_, whose memory scans those fifty years, Whose patriot forecast broods o'er coming-days, Smiles with the smiling throngs, and lifts his cheers, With those the people raise, And prays that firmer faith, spirit more free, May date from this proud day of jocund Jubilee.

The June and July numbers are dominated by the Jubilee, and _Punch_, though he spoke with many voices in dealing with the various phases of the festival, kept his criticism within limits of wholly genial satire and whimsicality. There was a scene of decorous "revelry by night" at the Reform Club, which gave a ball on June 16, recorded in a set of verses with solos for Sir William Harcourt, John Bright and Lord Rosebery, packed with political innuendoes, and winding up with a soliloquy from the grand old M.C. (without) who sings:--

Call this a Ball? More muddled every minute; Not one good dancer there. Glad I'm not in it!

The Lord Chamberlain, in Sambourne's picture, figures as the "boots" of an hotel, run off his legs by the demands of Princes, Potentates, Ambassadors:--

'Midst pleasures and 'midst palaces to roam, Is nice for foreign dignities, no doubt; But then they've lots of palaces at home, Which we are quite without.

"Robert, the City Waiter," descants on the festivities; the Editor was prodigal of puns; there were Jubilee mock advertisements; and a certain amount of criticism of the arrangements, though, as I note elsewhere, _Punch_ pays a special tribute to the police for their efficiency, courtesy, patience and humanity. A protest is entered against the route of procession being exclusively West End, and _Punch_ suggests an extension to take in some of the poorer parts of London. The procession itself is described in a long article entitled "The Longest Day," noting various incidents, such as the unhorsing of the Marquis of Lorne, and summing up in the words: "For impressive splendour and simple dignity, the Royal Procession couldn't be beaten. But as a Pageant there was much to be desired." The closed carriages were a mistake; the military bands were not fully used, and musically the procession was "the dullest of its sort ever witnessed in any big city on any big occasion." Still the police were A1, and Messrs. Brock gave the public a "Brocken night" at the Crystal Palace, where the rhododendrons were in their glory. The scene in the Abbey was "Abbey and glorious." But _Punch_, after an explosion of punning, becomes serious as he describes the scene when the Queen took her seat on the Throne, and the moving sequel when she discarded precedent and showed her womanliness by embracing her children. Nor does _Punch_ omit to mention the masque, performed by the Benchers of Gray's Inn, originally produced by Sir Francis Bacon in 1613; the Naval Review with the curious incident of Lord Charles Beresford's resignation in consequence of a breach of etiquette on his part in using public signals to send a private message to his wife; and the Queen's visit to Hatfield when the "lordly Cecil" entertained his sovereign as his ancestor had done in 1573.

_Punch_, as I have often been at pains to insist, was a Londoner, but he did not hesitate to pronounce the Manchester Exhibition as the "gem of the Jubilee," a "perfect article" and "a superb model." It was better than any of the shows at South Kensington, and _Punch_ rightly singles out as its special glory the magnificent Picture Gallery of Modern English Painters. On the other hand, provincial ideas of suitable Jubilee memorials come in for a good deal of ridicule. The list, which includes a central pig-market, a new town pump, a cemetery, a new sewage scheme, gasworks, etc., is clearly farcical, but an actual instance is quoted from the _Western Daily Mail_ of the decision of a village in Cardiganshire to celebrate Her Majesty's Jubilee by providing a public hearse. "The chairman, who originated the proposal, was congratulated upon his happy idea, and an Executive Committee was formed to carry it out," which prompted _Punch_ to suggest that they ought to get Mr. Hayden Coffin to sing their Jubilee ode. _Punch's_ own serious suggestion for a Jubilee memorial was the revival and extension of Queen Anne's Bounty to improve the lot of the poor clergy, in place of the Church House Scheme.

[Sidenote: _How to Conciliate Ireland_]

The visit of Prince Albert Victor (the Duke of Clarence) and Prince George (the present King) to Ireland in the summer of 1887 is taken as the text of one of _Punch's_ periodical appeals to the Queen to conciliate Ireland by going there herself, Hibernia being credited with a desire for her presence:--

Ah, then, if your Majesty's self we could see Sure we'd drop every grumble and quarrel; Stay a month in the year with my children and me, 'Twould be a nice change from Balmoral.

The Prince of Wales's silver wedding fell in 1888, and furnished _Punch_ with a theme for loyal verse. It was also the momentous year in which three Emperors reigned in Germany, but of the significance of the change from Wilhelm I to Wilhelm II I have spoken elsewhere. _Punch's_ Jubilee fervour had now died down, and Prince Henry of Battenberg's appointment as Governor of the Isle of Wight is recorded in a semi-burlesque picture of the Prince "with new scenery and costumes," and the comment: "Old England is safe at last."

On May 21 Prince Leopold of Battenberg (now Lord Mountbatten) had been born at Windsor: on the following day a meeting was held under the chairmanship of Lord Waterford to discuss the advisability of abolishing the office of Viceroy of Ireland. Accordingly, _Punch_, more in malice than seriousness, suggests as a solution of the Irish difficulty that a Battenberg Prince should be born in Ireland, and brought up as the future Viceroy, in imitation of the trick of Edward Longshanks as related by Drayton in his "Polyolbion":--

Through every part of Wales he to the Nobles sent That they unto his Court should come incontinent Of things that much concern'd the county to debate; But now behold the power of unavoided fate! When thus unto his will he fitly had them won, At her expected hour the Queen brought forth a son-- Young Edward, born in Wales, and of Carnarvon called, Thus by the English craft the Britons were enthralled.

_Punch_ treats the parallel from Paddy's point of view, and winds up:--

Sly Longshanks long ago with Cambria played a game-- What if, say, Battenberg should contemplate the same? Pat, give him a fair chance, will prove himself--right loyal; But--ye can't heal ould wounds with mere soft soap--though Royal.

The last line is, we fear, a much truer reading of the problem than the sentiments ascribed to Hibernia on a previous page.

The betrothal of the Princess Louise to the Earl, afterwards Duke, of Fife, in the summer of 1889, impelled _Punch_ to rewrite Burns's "The Wooing o't" for the occasion. The messages to the House from the Crown, asking that provision should be made for Prince Albert Victor and Princess Louise, led to a prolonged debate, and the question of Royal Grants was referred to a Committee of all sections of the House, on the basis that "Parliament ought not to recognize in an indefinite way the duty of providing for the Royal Family in the third generation." The Queen did not formally waive her claim, but made it clear that she would not press it in the case of any other of her grandchildren. Mr. Labouchere, Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Storey opposed the Majority Report of the Committee in spite of a strong speech made by Gladstone in favour of the grants, which were ultimately carried by large majorities. _Punch_ approved of the Committee, on the ground that it was high time we knew exactly how far the system was to be carried, and ascribed similar sentiments to the average working man in his new version of a popular song of the day. The Majority Report was embodied in the Prince of Wales's Children Bill, which became law on August 9, in spite of the opposition of those, including Mr. Morley and Sir William Harcourt, who maintained that the grant was proposed in such a way as to leave room for further claims and to bind future Parliaments.

[Sidenote: _Two Views of the Kaiser_]

The young Kaiser and his wife visited England in 1891, and _Punch's_ greeting came near to being fulsome. In July _Punch_, the Kaiser and the Prince of Wales are associated in the cartoon, "A Triple Alliance," the accompanying legend containing the following high tribute to the Imperial guest:--

The Prince of Wales doth join with all the world In praise of--Kaiser Wilhelm; by my hopes I do not think a braver gentleman More active-valiant, or more valiant young, More daring, or more bold, is now alive To grace this latter age with noble deeds.

Yet at the close of the year the feverish versatility of the young ruler is treated with the utmost disrespect:--

The German Emperor has lately rearranged his scheme of work for weekdays. From six A.M. to eight A.M. he gives lectures on Strategy and Tactics to generals over forty years old. From eight to ten he instructs the chief actors, musicians and painters of Berlin in the principles of their respective arts. The hours from ten to twelve he devotes to the compilation of his Memoirs in fifty-four volumes. A limited edition of large-paper copies is to be issued. From twelve to four P.M. he reviews regiments, cashiers colonels, captures fortresses, carries his own dispatches to himself, and makes speeches of varying length to all who will listen to him. Any professional reporter found taking accurate notes of His Majesty's words is immediately blown from a Krupp gun with the new smokeless powder. From four to eight he tries on uniforms, dismisses Ministers and officials, dictates state-papers to General Caprivi, and composes his history of "How I pricked the Bismarck Bubble." From eight to eleven P.M. His Majesty teaches schoolmasters how to teach, wives how to attend to their families, bankers how to carry on their business, and cooks how to prepare dinners. The rest of the day he devotes to himself. On Thursday next His Majesty leaves Berlin on his tenth visit to the European Courts.

Another royal visitor in 1891 was Prince Victor Emmanuel of Italy--the present King--to whom _Punch_, in the character of Niccolo Puncio Machiavelli, proffers worldly advice, advising him to be liberal of snuff-boxes.

The Prince of Wales, born in the same year as _Punch_, completed his fiftieth year in November. _Punch's_ Jubilee greeting is friendly without being effusive. Reviewing the Prince's career from childish days, _Punch_ recalls the picture of him in sailor kit as a child; the nation's "Suspense" at the time of the dangerous illness in December, 1871. _Punch_ had watched him all along, abroad and at home, "where'er you've travelled, toiled, skylarked"; and recognizes him at fifty as "every inch a Prince," and worthy of cordial greeting; adding a graceful compliment to Alexandra, "the unfading flower from Denmark, o'er the foam."

The betrothal of the Duke of Clarence to Princess Mary of Teck had been hailed with loyal enthusiasm, and his premature death in January, 1892, was recorded with genuine feeling and sympathy. In neither cartoon, however, was Tenniel at his best, and the memorial verses, though graceful and kindly, do not lend themselves to quotation, the reference to the "rending of Hymen's rosy band" betraying a pardonable inability to predict the sequel.

SOCIETY

Critics and satirists of fashionable English society in the early and middle periods of the Victorian age were mainly concerned with its arrogance and exclusiveness. As we reach the 'seventies, with the breaking down of the old caste barriers and the intrusion of the new plutocracy, the ground of attack is shifted; the "old nobility," dislodged from their Olympian fastnesses, are exhibited as not merely accepting but paying court to underbred millionaires, and eking out their reduced incomes by an irregular and undignified competition with journalists, shopkeepers, and even actors. Society had ceased to be exclusive; it was becoming "smart," and had taken to self-advertisement. Wealth without manners had invaded Mayfair.

[Sidenote: _Woes of the Country Squire_]

These days ushered in the age of Society journals, of Society beauties, of vulgarity in high places, of parasitic peers, of the invasion of society by American heiresses, of the beginning of the end of the chaperon, the dawn of the gospel of "self-expression," and the rebellion of sons and daughters. Money, or the lack of it, was at the root of all, or nearly all, these changes. Dukes had already begun to sell their libraries and art treasures, and the wail of the old landed aristocracy was not unfairly vocalized in "The Song of the Country Squire," to the air of "The Fine old English Gentleman," and published by _Punch_ in the autumn of 1882:--

The fine Old English Gentleman once held a fine estate, Of a few thousand acres of farm and forest land, with polite and punctually-paying tenants, excellent shooting, ancestral oaks, immemorial elms, and all that sort of thing. But it hasn't been so of late; For the rents have gone down about twenty per cent., lots of acres are laid down in grass, And the person who imagines that the Squire of whom Washington Irving and Mounseer Montalembert wrote all sorts of pretty things has a jolly good time of it in these de--testable days, Is a sentimental ass, Says the fine Old Country Gentleman, one of the present time.

The fine Old Country Gentleman has an Elizabethan mansion, But what the dickens is the good of that if his means continually narrow in proportion to His family's expansion? If he gives up his deer, and sells his timber, dismisses his servants, and thinks of advertising his house for a grammar school, Or a lunatic asylum (As he often has to do), what is there in his lot to excite the jealousy of those darned Radicals, though the common comfort of that poor _caput lupinum_, the Land Owner, on however little a scale Seems invariably to rile 'em? Asks the fine Old Country Gentleman, one of the modern time. With an encumbered property, diminishing rent-roll, and expenses beyond his income, The question which confronts him at every corner is, whence will the needful "tin" come? And when they prate to us about our "improvidence," and advise us to "cut down" and economize, why, where, in the name of patience, I ask'll Be the pull of being a Country Gentleman at all, if one has to live like a retired pork-butcher or prosperous publican, and perhaps you will answer That question, Mr. Charles Milnes Gaskell![8] Of the fine Old Country Gentleman, one of the modern time.

[Footnote 8: This gentleman had recently written an article on the subject in the _Nineteenth Century_.]

The "profiteer" was already in Society and on the moors; _Punch_ reviled him in "My 'art's in the 'Ighlands," and in a picture of an opulent Semite swearing that he hasn't "a drop of Hebrew blood in ma veinth, 'thelp me." Du Maurier created Sir Gorgius Midas as typical of the New Plutocracy--a gross, bediamonded figure, surrounded by flunkeys, with Dukes and Duchesses as his pensioners. The alleged poverty-stricken condition of the aristocracy is a frequent theme: one ducal family can only afford to go to the opera when Sir Gorgius lends them his box. But the Dukes still had their uses. The Beresford Midases put their boy's name down both for Eton and Harrow, and decided to send him to whichever has most "dooks" when the time comes. The New Rich show themselves apt pupils in all the snobbery of rank. For example, Sir Gorgius is shocked at the innovation of ladies and gentlemen riding in or on omnibuses. This is not documentary evidence, of course, but it was perfectly legitimate caricature. Du Maurier was not attacking the self-made man whose creed is summed up in the Lancashire saying: "Them as 'as brass don't care a damn what them as 'asn't thinks on 'em." He bestowed his ridicule impartially on the servile plutocrats who aped the customs of the titled classes, and the aristocrats who were unable to grow poor with dignity. Du Maurier's contribution to the social history of the middle and later Victorian age was invaluable on its critical and satirical side. But he was emphatically an aristocrat in the sense that he believed in good manners and fine physique: he set beauty above rank or riches, and was an early apostle of Eugenics. Long before the cult of athletics had begun to affect the stature and build of English girls, he devoted his pencil to glorifying the Junoesque type of English beauty. And while none of _Punch's_ artists ever paid more consistent homage to elegance and distinction of feature and figure, he could be on occasion a merciless satirist of the physical deterioration brought about by intermarriage amongst the old nobility. Thus in 1880 he showed a ridiculous little degenerate affectionately rebuking his effete parents for "interfering in his affairs," with the result that he is "under 5 feet 1 inch, can't say Boh to a goose, and justly passes for the gweatest guy in the whole county."

The same spirit is shown in the fantastic contrast between the aristocracies of the past and the future. The scene is "an island in British Oceana"; the time 1989, a hundred years later than the date of the picture:--

HIS HIGHNESS THE GRAND DUKE OF GEROLSTEIN: "Ach! Miss Prown--in your lôfly bresence I forket my zixty-vour kvarterings. I lay my Ditle at your Veet. Bitte! pecome ze Crant Tochess of Gerolstein!"

MISS BROWN: "Your Highness also forgets that I have sixty-four Quarterings!"

HIS HIGHNESS: "Ach! How is dat, Miss Prown?"

MISS BROWN: "Why, my father and mother, my four grandparents, my eight great-grandparents, my sixteen great-great-grandparents, and my thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents were all certified over six foot six inches, perfect in form and feature, and with health and minds and manners to match, or they would not have been allowed to marry. And though I'm the shortest and plainest girl in the colony, I should never be allowed to marry anyone so very much beneath myself as your Highness!"

[Sidenote: _Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns_]

In illustrating the falling away of the titled classes from the maxim _noblesse oblige_ on its physical side, Du Maurier occupied an exceptional position on _Punch_; but he was not less active than other artists and writers in exposing the "moral and intellectual damage" which they inflicted on the community. In 1878 the vogue of "Fancy Fairs" evokes a vigorous protest against the vanity, bad taste, forwardness and free-and-easiness of society women who made themselves cheap in order to sell dear to 'Arries. From this date onwards the vagaries of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, in whom Du Maurier incarnated all the pushfulness of the thrusting woman of fashion, are a constant source of entertainment. One of her earliest exploits as a Lion-hunter was to invite Monsieur de Paris to one of her receptions. Her husband thought she meant the Comte de Paris, but she speedily undeceives him. It was the headsman she was pursuing, not the Prince. "All the world" came, but the faithless executioner went to visit the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's instead! Later on, as the social mentor, guide, philosopher and friend of Lady Midas, we find her warning her pupil against inviting the aristocracy to meet each other. A music-hall celebrity must be provided as a "draw," and Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns recommends Nellie Micklemash and her banjo. "She is not respectable, but she is amusing, and that is everything." So when the Tichborne Claimant was released in 1884, Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns contemplates inviting him to dinner: "Surely there are still _some_ decent people who would like to meet him." Elsewhere and in more serious vein _Punch_ denounces the undue publicity given to this impostor's movements in the Press--one leading paper having stultified itself by condemning the practice in a leading article and simultaneously publishing an advertisement of the Claimant's appearance at a music-hall. This dualism, however, was no monopoly of the 'eighties and has become common form in the Georgian Press.

Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns acts as a bridge between the old and the new _régime_ in her ceaseless and indiscriminate worship of celebrities and notorieties. She is the descendant of Mrs. Leo Hunter, but adds the shrewdness and cynicism of the go-between to the simple silliness of her ancestress. Todeson, another familiar figure in Du Maurier's gallery, attaches himself exclusively to the old nobility, but is always putting his foot in it by being _plus royaliste que le roi_, or more ducal than the duchess. For in the slightly distorting mirror of Du Maurier's genius we see, as an evidence of the spread of liberal ideas, a Duke dining with his tailor and being kept in very good order by him; and a musical Duchess learning to sing Parisian chansonnettes from a French expert in the _franchement canaille_ manner. The craze for the stage among "Society people" had now reached formidable dimensions. They were no longer content with amateur theatricals, but had begun to enter into competition with the professionals.

The invasion of journalism by the same class _Punch_ took much more seriously. Hazlitt, some fifty years earlier, had written in his essay "On the Conversation of Lords": "The Press is so entirely monopolized by beauty, birth or importance in the State, that an author by profession resigns the field to the crowd of well-dressed competitors, out of modesty or pride." But this was written when the mania for fashionable novels by Noble Authors was at its height, and Hazlitt uses the word Press of the printing press generally. In the early 'eighties the competition of titled amateurs was mainly confined to Society journals, a characteristic product of the new fusion of classes. As one of their ablest and most cynical editors said of his own paper, they were "written by and for nobs and snobs." They are now practically dead, owing to the absorption in the daily Press of the special features--above all the "personal note"--then peculiar to these weekly chronicles of high life. _Punch_ ascribed the invasion of the Street of Ink by the amateurs to the penurious condition of the aristocracy and their ignoble readiness to turn their social opportunities into "copy" and cash. Under the heading of "_Labor Omnia Vincit_, or How Some of 'em try to live now," _Punch_ published a satiric sketch of the new activities of Mayfair. The scene is laid in the boudoir of Lady Skribeler, a successful contributor to various Society journals. The scene opens with the arrival of her friend the Hon. Mrs. Hardup, who gives a pathetic account of her disastrous ventures in business and her failure to secure an engagement on the stage. Why, asks Lady Skribeler, had she not made her husband go into trade or keep a shop, or sell wine?--

[Sidenote: _Titled Professionals_]

MRS. HARDUP: "Oh, he has done that. He was Chairman of that Thuringian Claret Company; and we got ever so many people about us to take a quantity. But it fermented--or did something stupid; and they do say it killed the poor Duke, who was very kind to Harry, you know, and took a hundred dozen at once. And now, of course, there's no sale--or whatever they call it; and Harry says if it can't be got rid of to a firm of Blue Ink Makers, who are inquiring about it, it will have to go out to the Colonies as Château Margaux--at a dreadful loss. [Summing up.] I don't believe the men understand trade a bit, dear. So I'm going to do something for myself."

The sequel describes her initiation into the tricks of the trade by Lady Skribeler:--

Profiting by the morning's conversation, Mrs. Hardup besieges unprotected Editors, contributes to the literature of her country most interesting weekly accounts of the doings of her friends and acquaintances, and, it is to be hoped, practically solves, to her own satisfaction, the secret of the way in which a good many of us manage to live now.

For success in this walk of journalism, "literary culture must be eschewed, for with literary culture come taste and discrimination--qualities which might fatally obstruct the path of the journalistic aspirant." It was not by any means monopolized by amateurs, and _Punch_, in his series of "Modern Types" a few years later, traces, under the heading "The Jack of all Journalisms," the rise to power and influence of a humble but unscrupulous scribe, successively venal musical and dramatic critic, interviewer and picturesque social reporter, but always "the blatant, cringing, insolent, able, disreputable wielder of a pen which draws much of its sting and its profit from the vanities and fears of his fellow-creatures." The sketch is an ingenious composite photograph, in which those familiar with London journalism in the 'eighties and 'nineties will recognize in almost every paragraph the lineaments of one or other of the most notorious and poisonous representatives of the Society Press.

As we have seen, journalism was only one field for the commercial instincts of penurious "Society people." In 1887 _Punch_ takes for his text the following paragraph from a daily paper:--

"One well-known West End Milliner is a graduate of Girton; another bears a title; a third conceals a name not unknown to Burke under a pseudonym.... Many of the best women of all classes are ready to do anything by which the honest penny may be earned."

_Punch_ was somewhat sceptical as to the honesty of their intentions; the only way, he tells us, to get an invitation to the dances given by one titled shopkeeper was to buy one of her bonnets. This may have been a malicious invention, but he was fairly entitled to make game of the advertisement which appeared in the _Manchester Evening Times_ in the spring of 1887:--

"To Christian Widowers.--A Nobleman's Widow, of good birth, about 40, no family, left with small income, pleasing, sweet-tempered, cultured, domesticated, fond of children, desires Settled Home and a high-minded Protestant Husband of 50, or older, seeking domestic happiness with a devoted, loving Christian wife.--Address----"

[Sidenote: _The American Invasion_]

The lady shopkeeper had become such an institution that _Punch_ included her in one of his series of "Modern Types" in 1891. The portrait is not exactly flattering, though he admitted that she sometimes possessed other than purely social qualifications for success:--

At first everything will go swimmingly. Friends will rally round her, and she may perhaps discover with a touching surprise that the staunchest and truest are those of whom, in her days of brilliant prosperity, she thought the least. But a _succès d'estime_ is soon exhausted. Unless she conducts her business on purely business lines, delivers her goods when they are wanted, and, for her own protection, sends in her accounts as they fall due, and looks carefully after their payment, her customers and her profits will fall away. But if she attends strictly to business herself, or engages a good business woman to assist her, and orders her affairs in accordance with the dictates of a proper self-interest, she is almost certain to do well, and to reap the reward of those who face the world without flinching, and fight the battle of life sturdily and with an honest purpose.

Millinery was the favourite field of enterprise, but the duchess who rebuked the indiscreet Todeson for his condemnation of trade as unworthy of the nobility, mentioned that her husband had gone in for bric-à-brac and her mother for confectionery. "Society people," in short, were dabbling extensively in trade, but it was mainly confined to the luxury trades. _Punch_ does not mention, however, what was generally believed to be true, that a well-known peer was a partner in a firm of money-lenders, trading under a name most literally suggestive of blood-sucking. Commercialism in high places is illustrated indirectly but pointedly by the invasion of American heiresses. Dowagers with large families of daughters--for large families were still frequent and fashionable--found themselves seriously affected by the "unfair competition" of these wealthy and vivacious beauties. In 1888 _Punch_ satirized their misfortunes in a picture representing English society mothers engaging American governesses so that their daughters might be instructed how to hold their own against American girls in attracting eligible dukes. So again in the _Almanack_ of 1889, under the title "Social Diagnosis," a French baron identifies a certain lady as an English duchess on the evidence of her indisputably American origin, and in the same year, in a sardonic article, _Punch_ exposes the American tendency to gloat over evidences of class distinctions in English society, while pretending to denounce them. This was inspired by the activities of certain American correspondents and "G. W. S." (the late Mr. Smalley) in particular, who is described as "too intimate with the 'hupper suckles' to think much of them." It was he, by the way, whose favourite form of social entertainment was described as not a "small and early" but an "Earl and Smalley." The hardest thing that _Punch_ said of the American heiresses was put into the mouth of one of their number. In 1890 he published a picture of three fair New Yorkers conversing with a young Englishman. When he asks whether their father had come with them to Europe, one of them replies: "Pa's much too vulgar to be with us. It's as much as we can do to stand Ma." But the verses on "The American Girl" in the same year wind up on a note of reluctant admiration:--

[Sidenote: _Mayfair's New Idols_]

THE AMERICAN GIRL.

(An American Correspondent of _The Galignani Messenger_ is very severe on the manners of his fair countrywomen.)

She "guesses" and she "calculates," she wears all sorts o' collars, Her yellow hair is not without suspicion of a dye; Her "Poppa" is a dull old man who turned pork into dollars, But everyone admits that she's indubitably spry.

She did Rome in a swift two days, gave half the time to Venice, But vows that she saw everything, although in awful haste; She's fond of dancing, but she seems to fight shy of lawn tennis Because it might endanger the proportions of her waist.

Her manner might be well defined as elegantly skittish; She loves a Lord as only a Republican can do; And quite the best of titles she's persuaded are the British, And well she knows the Peerage, for she reads it through and through.

She's bediamonded superbly, and shines like a constellation, You scarce can see her fingers for the multitude of rings; She's just a shade too conscious, so it seems, of admiration, With irritating tendencies to wriggle when she sings.

She owns she is "Amur'can," and her accent is alarming; Her birthplace has an awful name you pray you may forget; Yet, after all, we own _La Belle Américaine_ is charming, So let us hope she'll win at last her long-sought coronet.

An heroic attempt was made in 1882 by that devoted apostle of the (socially) Sublime and Beautiful, Mr. Gillett, to revive Almack's. But, as _Punch_ had frankly and even cheerfully recognized in connexion with a previous attempt, the time had gone by for the oligarchical control of the entertainments of the fashionable world.

Society had ceased to be small, select and exclusive; it was becoming increasingly mixed, cosmopolitan and plutocratic. The horizon was enlarged and the range of interests multiplied, but the desire to be in the movement was not always indulged in with dignity or discretion. Mayfair worshipped at new shrines and erected new idols. It was an age of strange crazes and pets and favourites. The great ladies of the 'thirties and 'forties may have been arrogant, but they seldom exploited their personalities, or cultivated a limelight notoriety. There is shrewd criticism in the legend of one of the earliest of the "Things one would have rather left unsaid," illustrated by Du Maurier in 1888:--

AUNT JANE: "Ugh! When I was your age, Matilda, Ladies of Rank and Position didn't have their photographs exposed in the shop windows."

MATILDA (_always anxious to agree_): "Of course not, Aunt Jane. I suppose photography wasn't invented then?"

[Sidenote: _Old Bailey Ladies_]

Photography has much to answer for; and certainly played its part in luring the titled classes from their ivory towers, and creating the professional beauty. The "Giddy Society Lady," as portrayed by _Punch_ in 1890, is a new version of the "Model Fast Lady" he described some forty years earlier, and though less mannish in her deportment, is much more flashy, vulgar and selfish than her predecessor. Tailor-made by day, excessively _décolletée_ at night, and preferring Bessie Bellwood to Beethoven, this semi-detached and expensive wife as delineated by _Punch_ is not an attractive figure. Yet with very few changes the portrait might stand for the modern society Maenad. Cigarette-smoking, it should be noted, was still considered "fast." Another recurrent type of unlovely womanhood much in evidence in these years is the "old Bailey lady" as _Punch_ christened her many years before. In 1886 the writer of "A Bad Woman's Diary" expressly states that she would not go to a theatre in Lent, though she spends all her spare time attending murder trials. _Punch_ did not spare the judges who lent themselves to this abuse, as may be gathered from the following dialogue:--

HER GRACE: "Thank you so much for keeping such nice places for us, Judge! It was quite a treat! What romantic looking creatures they are, those four pirates! I suppose they really did cut the Captain and Mate and Cook into bits, and there's no doubt about the Verdict?"

SIR DRACO: "Very little indeed, I fear!"

HER GRACE: "Poor Dears! I suppose if I and the girls get there between five and six to-morrow, we shall be in time to see you pass the sentence? Sorry to miss your summing-up, but we've got an afternoon concert, you know!"

SIR DRACO: "I'll take care that it shall be all right for you, Duchess!"

So, again, under the sarcastic heading, "True Feminine Delicacy of Feeling," this morbid curiosity is scarified in the conversation of two ladies in 1889:--

EMILY (_who has called to take Lizzie to the great Murder Trial_): "What, deep black, dearest?"

LIZZIE: "Yes. I thought it would be only decent, as the poor wretch is sure to be found guilty."

EMILY: "Ah! Where I was dining last night, it was even betting which way the verdict would go, so I only put on half mourning!"

It was in the same year that _Punch_ published a double cut, showing the _tricoteuses_ under the guillotine at the French Revolution, and, as a pendant, society ladies in a modern English Court of Justice.

[Sidenote: _The Terrors of Reminiscence_]

The fashionable craze for "slumming," which set in early in the 'eighties, was less objectionable; it was at worst an excrescence on the genuine interest taken in the housing question by serious reformers. But as practised by Mayfair it was ridiculed by _Punch_ as a mere excuse for excitement; Du Maurier reduced it to an absurdity by his picture of society ladies going slumming in mackintoshes to avoid infection; and by another of Todeson, who had taken part in one of these excursions, being disillusioned by contact with real workers, and self-sacrificing East End clergymen. I have not been able to ascertain whether the same artist's picture of professional pugilists being _fêted_ by society in 1887 was a mere piece of burlesque or not; but it was, at any rate, a good example of intelligent anticipation. His satire of "Society's new pet--the artist's model," in a picture of a handsome Junonian girl surrounded by infatuated Duchesses, drinking in her artless and h-less confidences, is probably only a fantastic caricature of aristocratic commercialism, as one of the great ladies is represented as thinking of letting her daughter become a model as a means of social advancement. Mention has been made of the invasion of journalism by society people. But students of foretastes and parallels will find a really remarkable anticipation of the terrors of modern Diaritis--not to use a more vulgar word--in the burlesque review of _A Modern Memoir_--the Autobiography and Letters of Miss Skimley Harpole, published by Messrs. Rakings & Co.:--

Seldom have we perused a book with so much interest as has thrilled us during our reading of these two handsome volumes. Situate as Miss Harpole was, the daughter of a famous bishop, claiming for mother a lady whose good deeds are remembered to this day, sister of one of the most brilliant female leaders of society, and herself popular, fêted and caressed, there is small room for wonder that even the bare details of Miss Harpole's everyday life would prove interesting, but when told in a charmingly frank style her book becomes a model of what a Memoir should be. In a few short simple sentences she, with delicious _naïveté_, relates her home life, and so clearly is the picture put before us that we cannot resist quoting the fragment:

"Take us at home of a night! The Bishop in an easy chair, with his gaitered legs crossed, and elevated on the back of another, with a short clay pipe in his mouth, is vaguely mixing his eleventh tumbler of hot gin-and-water, causing us girls great pain to conceal our titters, when, as happens very often at this period of the evening, he deposits the greater part of the hot water on the tablecloth or himself. My mother, regardless of him, sits, carefully studying a sporting paper, and the Racing Calendar, and making her selections for the next day's horse-race. For a heavy gambler is my mother, as is my brother, who, when at home--which is seldom--is either delighted at having won, or in the sulks because he has lost money to his fellow legal students at billiards. As a rule he is delighted, and always carries a lump of chalk in his pocket. My sister is writing notes to Men about Town, Peers and Guardsmen, her lovely features only losing their serenity when lit up by an arch look of wonderment whether she has made appointments with two different men at the same hour and place, while I am sitting, in my school-girlish way, by myself, making notes, so as to tell the world some day the true story of my life."

Space forbids us to say any more of the merits of this charming work, but we cannot resist one extract which shows how true was the estimate of the Bishop's noble character:--

"We were one night at the Italian opera, of which my father was passionately fond, and during the ballet our attention was drawn to a singularly lovely girl on the stage. 'Alas!' said the Colonel, 'she is as bad as she is beautiful.' The Bishop immediately avowed his readiness to investigate the case at the earliest opportunity. He was always thinking of others, despite Mamma's occasionally stubborn opposition."

This concludes our notice. In brief, the book is a most excellent specimen of the modern style of Memoir, conceived with kindliness of heart and charity of remembrance and executed with literary taste, skill and polish.

This was fiction, based on what purported to be truth, and in turn was destined to be easily eclipsed by the actual reminiscences of a later generation. It may be noted in this context that the "blazing indiscretions" in the "Life of Bishop Wilberforce," published in 1883, and the letters of protest which they evoked, had already prompted the satire and sympathy of _Punch_.

[Sidenote: _Thought-Reading and Theosophy_]

The fashionable quest of the unseen world took no new forms in the 'seventies and 'eighties. We hear much less of Spiritualism under that name. This was no doubt in part due to the success of Maskelyne and Cook in outdoing the "manifestations" of mediums, a success so remarkable that they were actually claimed as spiritualists by some of the fraternity. In 1874 _Punch_ waxes facetious at the statement that additional help had been obtained in the working of certain mines by ghostly assistants. Later on there are references to the activities of palmists and Society Sibyls, but the study of the Unseen and the Occult in the 'eighties entered on a new and formidable phase with the advent of thought-readers, theosophists and psychical researchers. _Punch_ devotes a good deal of space to an exhibition of his powers by Irving Bishop, a well-known thought-reader of the time, at which politicians were impressed and sceptics--represented by Ray Lankester--were unconvinced. The pin-finding business was certainly much less impressive than the exploits of the Zancigs some thirty years later. The invasion of the drawing-room by pseudo-science met with little sympathy from _Punch_, who summed up his view in the phrase, "modish science is a sciolist"; and in 1891 he expressed his resentment against the new mysticism and the jargon of Theosophy in a comprehensive denunciation of "useless knowledge." The verses are worth quoting, not for their poetic quality but for the list of names quoted:--

OUR REAL DESIDERATUM

(_By a "Well-informed" Fool_)

Ah! I was fogged by the Materialistic, By Huxley and by Zola, Koch and Moore; And now there comes a Maëlstrom of the Mystic To whirl me further yet from sense's shore. Microbes were much too much for me, bacilli Bewildered me, and phagocytes did daze, But now the author 'cute of _Piccadilly_, Harris the Prophet, the Blavatsky craze, Thibet, Theosophy, and Bounding Brothers-- No, Mystic Ones--Mahatmas I should say, But really they seem so much like the others In slippery agility!--day by day Mystify me yet more. Those germs were bad enough, But what are they compared with Astral Bodies? Of Useless Knowledge I have almost had enough, I really envy uninquiring noddies. I would not be a Chela if I could. I have a horror of the Esoterical. Besant and Olcott may be wise and good, They seem to me pursuing the chimerical. Maddened by mysteries of "Precipitation," The Occult Dream and the Bacillus-Dance; We need Societies for the propagation Of Useful--Ignorance!

This bracketing of Huxley with Zola is decidedly unfair, and the juxtaposition of Koch the famous physiologist and of Mr. George Moore--already known for his realistic romances--borders on the grotesque. _Piccadilly_ is, of course, the brilliant novel by Laurence Oliphant, diplomatist, man of the world and mystic, who became the disciple of the American "prophet" Harris, spiritualist and founder of the "Brotherhood of the New Life"; and Blavatsky is the amazing Russian lady who brought a new religion from the Far East as another woman, Mrs. Eddy, brought another from the Far West. Madame Blavatsky is no more, but Mrs. Besant is still very much with us, and Theosophy and Christian Science are firmly established in a country which, as the French cynic remarked, boasts a hundred and fifty religions but only one sauce.

[Sidenote: _The Æsthetic Movement_]

[Sidenote: _The Chief Æsthete_]

But of all the Society crazes of this period the Æsthetic movement created the most resounding stir. Æstheticism on its social side was an excrescence on, and a perversion of, doctrines and principles to which English art and decorative design and letters owed a real and lasting debt. It is enough to mention the names of Rossetti and Morris, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Ruskin to realize how far the fashionable æsthetes disimproved on their masters. Ruskin was in particular unfortunate, since many of their catchwords were borrowed from him and distorted to serve other ends. For while Ruskin deplored the fetish-worship of athletics, he believed in honest manual labour, and never subscribed to the maxim of art for art's sake, which, by the way, was anathema to Watts. Morris was essentially manly and a worker. The æsthetes were neither. In life and letters they cultivated languor, eccentricity, paradox, and extravagance of speech and dress. It was their aim to exploit, as a social asset and a means to the achievement of notoriety, the creed of artistic emotion which had been formulated by Pater. For Oxford, it must be regretfully admitted, was the "spiritual home" of the æsthetes. The word "æsthetic," as we have seen, in its modern cant sense dates back to the 'sixties, but it was not until the middle 'seventies that it began seriously to attract the attention of _Punch_. To 1874 belongs Du Maurier's picture of the effete-looking artist begging his wife to let him nurse the china teapot she had monopolized all the morning. In 1876 we read of the damping of "Mr. Boniface Brasenose's" enthusiasm by a fashionable lady. But the fashionable ladies soon succumbed to the craze, and became adepts in the lingo of intensity. _Punch_ attacked the æsthetes alternately with the rapier and the bludgeon, using the former in the delicate raillery of Du Maurier's pictures, the latter in prose and verse comments on their eccentricities and extravagance. Here his attitude is invariably that of the healthy Philistine. But when we speak of "æsthetes" it would be more precise to use the singular. Maudle and Postlethwaite and all the other types satirized by Du Maurier are only variants on the chief priest of the new cult, Oscar Wilde, whom _Punch_ attacked directly and indirectly with all the weapons at his disposal. _Punch's_ ridicule was often trenchant and effective, but undoubtedly it helped to advertise one who was avid of notoriety, and infinitely preferred abuse to neglect. _Punch's_ feelings towards him were all through of a piece with those of the witty Fellow of All Souls who, when a friend of Wilde's indignantly remarked that the men who had ducked him in the Cherwell ought to be prosecuted, interposed with the biting comment, "I suppose you mean under the Rivers' Pollution Act." For more than a year and a half, from the spring of 1881 to the end of 1882, there was seldom a number without a picture or a poem or a prose article in which the chief æsthete was held up to derision. Sambourne's drawing in June, 1881, is called a "fancy portrait," but it is quite a realistic likeness. "A Maudle-in Ballad, to the Lily," had appeared in April:--

My lank limp lily, my long lithe lily, My languid lily-love, fragile and thin, With dank leaves dangling and flower-flap chilly, That shines like the shin of a Highland gilly! Mottled and moist as a cold toad's skin! Lustrous and leper-white, splendid and splay! Art thou not Utter? and wholly akin To my own wan soul and my own wan chin, And my own wan nose-tip, tilted to sway The peacock's feather, sweeter than sin, That I bought for a halfpenny, yesterday?

My long lithe lily, my languid lily, My lank limp lily-love, how shall I win-- Woo thee to wink at me? Silver lily, How shall I sing to thee, softly, or shrilly? What shall I weave for thee--which shall I spin-- Rondel, or rondeau, or virelay? Shall I buzz like a bee, with my face thrust in Thy choice, chaste chalice, or choose me a tin Trumpet, or touchingly, tenderly play On the weird bird-whistle, sweeter than sin, That I bought for a halfpenny, yesterday?

Other parodies by "Oscuro Wildegoose" followed, and Wilde's poems are "slated" in the Bludyer vein under the heading "Swinburne and Water." A good deal of Wilde's verse was derivative--even tertiary deposit--and _Punch_ made fair game of the Swinburnian echoes and phrases such as "argent body," "pulse of sin," and "kosmic soul." But his literary criticism is somewhat heavy-handed. He is much happier in "Oscuro Wildegoose's" burlesque sonnet lamenting the unenlightened Philistinism of Grahamstown, in South Africa, where the Town Council did not know what a dado was, and conjectured that it was an ecclesiastical term! Wilde's visit to America in 1882 let loose a cascade of ridicule beginning with a bogus interview, followed up by a cartoon "Ariadne in Naxos," representing (in the manner of W. B. Richmond) the grief of Æstheticism at the departure of her hierophant. When Wilde lectured at Boston sixty students appeared in white waistcoats and knee-breeches, with sun-flowers in their buttonholes, and _Punch_ welcomed the attention as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of Wilde's efforts to revolutionize costume. Later on occurred the episode--which caused _Punch_ unfeigned delight--of a letter addressed to "Oscar Wilde, Poet, London," being returned as "Not known." But the craze was passing. Gilbert's _Patience_, produced in 1881, had been largely instrumental in reducing the pose of preciosity to its true proportions, and by the summer of 1883 we find _Punch_ coupling "Oscar" and "Jumbo" (the elephant) together as overrated lions. From this point onward the campaign slackens. In some acid verses on the _Zeit-Geist_ in the spring of 1884, which we quote later on, a would-be Juvenal denounces vulgarity as the dominant feature of the time; and in his list of nuisances and impostors no room is found for the æsthete. At the close of the same year, however, to judge by another set of pessimistic verses, he was still active if not exactly rampant:--

The "culture," too, of the æsthetes, with all its flaccid flams, Its turgid affectations and its silly sickly shams, Is but as dross of Brummagem compared with virgin gold, When matched against the vigorous realities of old.

[Sidenote: _The Cult of Intensity_]

The "Dilettante" satirized in a rather ponderous article--one of the series of "Modern Types"--in 1890 represents a later stage of pseudo-culture, in which a contempt for everything characteristically English is the leading trait. He warbles French chansonnettes, defies all the rules of English grammar and metre in his poetry, is much in request at charitable concerts in aristocratic drawing-rooms, affects a mincing delicacy in gait and manner, paints his face in middle age, talks habitually in an artistic jargon, and passes away in an odour of pastilles. The type existed and exists, but hardly deserved such detailed and elaborate portraiture. There is more interest in the verses on the over-cultured undergraduate in 1891--one of a series entitled "Men who have taken me in--to dinner," by a Dinner Belle:--

He stood, as if posed by a column, Awaiting our hostess' advance; Complacently pallid and solemn, He deigned an Olympian glance. Icy cool, in a room like a crater, He silently marched me downstairs, And Mont Blanc could not freeze with a greater Assurance of grandeur and airs.

I questioned if Balliol was jolly-- "Your epithet," sighed he, "means noise, Vile noise!" At his age it were folly To revel with Philistine boys. Competition, the century's vulture, Devoured academical fools; For himself, utter pilgrim of Culture, He countenanced none of the schools.

Exams. were a Brummagem fashion Of mobs and inferior taste; They withered "Translucence" and "Passion," They vulgarized leisure by haste. Self to realize--that was the question, Inscrutable still while the cooks Of our Colleges preached indigestion, Their Dons indigestible books.

Two volumes alone were not bathos, The one by an early Chinese, The other, of infinite pathos, Our Nursery Rhymes, if you please. He was lost, he avowed, in this era; His spirit was seared by the West, But he deemed to be Monk in Madeira Would probably suit him the best.

[Sidenote: _Preciosity and Self-Expression_]

It is not a bad picture of Oxford preciosity in the early 'nineties--the age of the _Yellow Book_--and contains the first reference in _Punch_ to the new educational gospel of self-realization, or "self-expression," as it is now called. The mention of early Chinese poetry was probably only a piece of "intelligent anticipation," for its vogue only began yesterday. So too with the Nursery Rhymes which some of the Georgian poets assiduously cultivate. But there is no foreshadowing of the characteristic Balliol product of some ten years later, the "intellectual blood" who combined hard and free living with hard work for his schools--who was at once dissipated and distinguished. The new worship of intellect--a sort of inverted snobbery--had already been satirized by Du Maurier in his sketch of the new _parvenu_, foreshadowing the "coming aristocracy of mind":--

HE: "Charming youth, that young Bellamy--such a refined and cultivated intellect! When you think what he's risen from, poor fellow, it really does him credit!"

SHE: "Why, were his people--a--inferiah?"

HE: "Well, yes. His Grandfather's an Earl, you know, and his Uncle's a Bishop; and he himself is Heir to an old Baronetcy with eighty thousand a year!"

Manners were in a state of transition and flux. As late as 1883 smoking in the presence of ladies was still taboo and severely restricted even at clubs, and _Punch_ contrasts the "bereavement" of gentlemen by the disappearance of ladies after dessert with the "consolation" afforded by the cigarette. It was not until 1884 that smoking was allowed for the first time after dinners at the Mansion House, an innovation deplored in the wail of an "Old Fogey." _Punch_ had no love of the old proprieties where they were insincere, as, for example, when in 1881 he represented Mrs. Jones declining the offer of a "hortherized copy" of the book of words of the _Dam o' Cameleers_ from a hawker: "Oh no, thank you. We've come to see the _acting_, we do not wish to understand the _play_." But he resented the curt colloquialisms, an outcome of the general speeding-up of life, which in his view impaired the courtesies of social intercourse between the sexes; while on the other hand modish artificialities, whether new or old, always excited his ire. Twice over in 1884 he was moved to protest against the excessive use of cosmetics, in the verses to a "Painted Lady" (prompted by Malcolm Morris's address at the Health Exhibition), in which the writer looks forward to the time when it will be fashionable to be healthy, and a few months later, in "A Few Home Truths," we read:--

Our matrons and our girls "make up" with powder, bismuth, dye-- Figures as well as frocks, obliging milliners supply-- Alas! the fairest cheeks are stained with artificial hue: 'Tis true--'tis pity; pity 'tis, 'tis true!

[Sidenote: _High-handed Greetings_]

Nowadays young ladies begin making-up rather earlier, but, if _Punch_ is to be believed, we can draw consolation from the fact that they are little worse in this respect than their modish mothers or grandmothers. Another of _Punch's_ pet aversions was the fashionable high hand-shake introduced in the 'nineties:--

HANDS AS THEY ARE SHOOK

(New Style)

In healthier times, when friends would meet Their friends in chamber, park, or street, Each, as hereunder, each would greet.

Your level hand went forth; you clasped Your crony's; each his comrade's grasped-- If roughly, neither friend was rasped.

Such was the good old-fashioned cue Of honest British "How d'ye do?" I think it manly still--don't you?

But now, when smug acquaintance hails A set that would be "smart," but fails, Another principle prevails.

The arm, in lifted curve displayed, Droops limply o'er the shoulder-blade, As needing some chirurgeon's aid.

[Sidenote: _The Decline of the Chaperon_]

The offenders here castigated are young men, but the ladies excelled in the new greeting. Languor was the distinguishing note of the young men of fashion in the 'eighties and 'nineties. It was the age of the "masher"--dreadful word--of the "Johnnie" and the "Chappie." In 1883 _Punch_ published a poem entitled "Child Chappie's Pilgrimage," a modern Rake's Progress. Later on he satirized the studied imbecility of deportment of young dandies entering a ballroom as "The Earlswood Totter." Students of slang will note with interest the emergence of the word "bounder" in the year 1887. _Punch's_ verses on the type thus designated indicate a much harsher view than now prevails. Nowadays we admit that a "bounder," though socially "impossible," may be a "stout fellow." _Punch's_ portrait, in which the "bounder" is represented as a bilker and a blackmailer, corresponds with the "cad" in the worst sense which we now attribute to that word. Mention has been made of the decline of the _chaperon_. Here _Punch_ virtually sides with the "little flirt" who boldly enunciates the doctrine that "in future a girl is her own chaperon." At the same time he clearly disapproved of the new habit of dispensing with introductions, and its logical outcome, satirized in one of Du Maurier's most graceful pictures--entertainments at which the hostess was ignorant of the very names of her guests.

The Roller-Skating craze, which attained the dimensions of an epidemic in 1875 and 1876, is treated by _Punch_ rather as a form of social recreation fraught with matrimonial possibilities than an athletic pastime.

The year 1876 was also noteworthy for an epidemic of Fancy Dress Balls and Spelling Bees. The latter were never popular in Mayfair; spelling had never been a strong point with the British aristocracy. But in less exalted circles Spelling Bees flourished exceedingly for a while, and the prizes awarded may well have conduced to an improvement in the orthography of the upper middle classes. _Punch's_ references to the craze are copious. It may suffice, however, to quote his "Dream of a Spelling-Bee," an engaging piece of dictionary-made nonsense verse:--

Menageries where sleuth-hounds caracole, Where jaguar phalanx and phlegmatic gnu Fright ptarmigan and kestrels cheek by jowl With peewit and precocious cockatoo:

Gaunt seneschals, in crochety cockades, With seine-nets trawl for porpoise in lagoons; While scullions gauge erratic escapades Of madrepores in water-logged galleons:

Flamboyant triptychs groined with gherkins green, In reckless fracas with coquettish bream, Ecstatic gurgoyles, with grotesque chagrin, Garnish the gruesome nightmare of my dream!

[Sidenote: _Suburban Sentiment_]

The Spelling Bee was a solace of the suburbs, which were steadily rising into prominence, owing to increased facilities of communication with the centre of London, and the "Suburban Love Song" which _Punch_ printed in May, 1889, marks the emergence of a class of society hitherto neglected in his pages--a class quite well-educated and not vulgar, but essentially bourgeois and sentimental:--

The blacks float down with a lazy grace, Hey, how the twirtle-birds twitter! And softly settle on hands and face; And the shards in the rockery glitter.

The boughs are black and the buds are green-- Hey, how the twitter-birds twirtle! And Cicely over the trellis-screen Is bleaching her summer kirtle.

The mustard and cress (can they grow apart-- Those twin-souls, cress and mustard?) Are springing apace: they have made such a start That the pattern is rather fluster'd:

For I made a device in the moist dark mould, In the shape of A's and S's, In capital letters, firm and bold, I sow'd my mustard and cresses.

Here comes no nymph where the blue waves lisp On the white sands' gleaming level, Where the sharp light strikes on the laurel crisp, And flowers in the cool shade revel.

But the garden shrubs are as fair to me As pine and arbutus and myrtle That grow by the shores of the Grecian sea, Where deathless nightingales twirtle.

And the little house, with its suites complete, And the manifold anti-macassar, And the chalet cage, whence he greets the street-- _Meae puellae passer_--

Are fairer than aught that the sun is above In the world as much as I've seen of it; For the little house is the realm of love, And my sweet little girl is the queen of it.

[Sidenote: _Foreign Travel Popularized_]

For another view of the suburbs one may turn to the drab and depressing realism of George Gissing's novels. _Punch_ himself did not always look at them through rose-coloured spectacles, and a year later, under the heading "Green Pastures or Piccadilly?" (adapted from a book by William Black), emphasizes the drawbacks of a bad train service, exorbitant tradesmen, imperfect drainage, and the desolation of a region in which, from 9 A.M. to 6 P.M., "not a single male human being is visible, all of them being in town."

At the beginning of this period foreign travel had ceased to be the exclusive privilege of the "classes." The days of cheap trips to "Lovely Lucerne" were yet to come, but Cook was already a power in the land, and as early as the close of 1874 we find _Punch_ frankly expressing his opinion that travel agencies had assisted to "lower middle-class-Englishize the Continent." The value of travel as a corrective of insularity and a means of promoting a better understanding of our foreign neighbours is not recognized. Residence on the Continent was another matter, and the series of articles, "Elizabeth's residence in a French country house," indicate the possibilities of enlightenment on various points. In particular stress is laid on the fact that there was no spoiling of women in France; in that country they were the real workers. At home the increase of excursion trains only served to excite _Punch's_ wrath against their discomfort and overcrowding and the greed of directors. Yet these drawbacks did not prevent impecunious or economical aristocrats from travelling third class, though their domestics had to go first.

The everlasting servant problem recurs again and again in the 'eighties. Complaints of inadequate wages are seldom heard. In 1876 _Punch_ refers to a letter of Charles Reade on the comparative luxury of the lives of servants contrasted with those of dressmakers. In 1875 Mrs. Crawshay, of Cyfarthfa, had read a paper before the British Association advocating the introduction of "Lady Helps," but _Punch_ was not convinced by her arguments, and turned the suggestion to something like ridicule in his burlesque extension of the idea in a series of advertisements of "Gentlemen Helps." "Jeames" was still a target, but a dwindling target of _Punch's_ satire. When the _Morning Post_ was reduced to a penny in 1881, "Jeames" tells the policeman that on hearing the news "you might have knocked me down with a peacock's feather." As of old, _Punch_ found the real root of flunkeyism in the snobbery of masters and mistresses, and the worst offenders in this period were the _parvenus_, like Sir Gorgius Midas, who surrounded themselves with flunkeys even at picnics, and exaggerated the ostentation of the class whose manners they crudely aped. The shabbily dressed peer is contrasted with the bediamonded _parvenu_, and in one of Du Maurier's "Social Problem" pictures the problem is to tell the butler from the lord, the former being a most aristocratic-looking person, while his master--a new creation--is an unmistakable "bounder." Towards the growing self-assertion of female servants _Punch_ was much more tolerant. In 1877, when the problem was already acute, he praises an independent attitude in a servant as being merely business-like, and later on sides with Mary Ann against despotic mistresses who advertised for parlourmaids and cooks who must not wear fringes. In 1891 _Punch_ published a set of verses inspired by the dismissal, after nine days, of a maid who refused to wear a cap. But the extremists who would make the mistress the "woman" and the servant the "lady" found no favour in his sight; he was no more a supporter of tyrannical servants than of exacting mistresses, and in 1884 our sympathies are distinctly enlisted on the side of the graceful young wife, terrified at the prospect of having to give warning to a formidable cook, and begging the page-boy to stand by during the ordeal.

[Sidenote: _Mistress and Maid_]

In 1886 _Punch_ discussed the formation of an Anti-Tipping League, but came to the shrewd conclusion, verified by experience, that it called for too much courage to prove successful. A year before, in a series of papers on "Public Grievances," he had published a set of letters written from different points of view, showing that mistresses and maids were both at fault. The sketch of "My Housemaid" in 1892 reverts to the old complaints of destructiveness and "followers," and notices, as special traits, a love of funerals and Exeter Hall.

Nine years earlier the _Daily Telegraph_ had published a sensational report of the impending importation of Chinese labour for domestic service. _Punch_ was not inclined to take the report seriously, but it cropped up again in 1882 in the _St. James's Gazette_:--

Domestic servants will view with well-grounded anxiety a decision arrived at by the Chinese merchants who met in conference a few days ago in London. It was resolved, among other things, to send letters to various Clubs in China, recommending emigration to England. If this recommendation is acted on, we may be on the eve of a great domestic and social revolution. There will, no doubt, be a prejudice at first in some households against the introduction into the family circle of the "heathen Chinee." But when his merits are discovered, it is not impossible he may be warmly welcomed as a valuable acquisition, meeting one of the most pressing requirements of the day.

_Punch_ contented himself with publishing a mock protest from "John Thomas" of Belgravia against this "rediklus" proposal:--

The "St. Jeames's" takes a Lo view of the Domestic's Posishon. As if Work was the one thing Needfull. Whereas the fact is that a Footman in Good Societa is requier'd not only for Use but much more still for horniment. Look at a Chinee's legs. Look at his shoalders. Where's the bredth of the Won and the Carves of the Huther? Compare our ites mine and his. Six foot to sixpennuth of apence. Ow can I and sitch as me think of bein jellus of a Beger like that? If we was we mite petition for a additional Dooty on Forren Men Servants; but we don't want No sich Protection for Native Industry agin Imports.

[Sidenote: _The Doctors' Dilemma_]

In the same vein is a picture of a policeman paralysed by the appearance of a male Chinese cook in the area. But a somewhat different note is sounded in the Rip Van Winkle survey of England in 1932, published in the same number as John Thomas's protest, showing the British workman crowded out of every sort of employment by his laziness and greed and forced to take refuge in the workhouse, while the work of the country is wholly done by industrious aliens.

The scandal of underpaid governesses practically disappears from _Punch's_ pages in this period. The evil was not extinct, but "superfluous women" were beginning to find other occupations, and the growing popularity of girls' schools undoubtedly diminished the demand for governesses.

In regard to inequalities of remuneration, _Punch_ proved himself a sturdy champion of the medical profession. A lecture by Mr. Richard Davy at the Westminster Hospital in the autumn of 1875 took a decidedly pessimistic view of the professional prospects of medical students:--

Their salaries were simply miserable; hospital physicians and surgeons were, for the most part, unpaid. Poor Law Officers most piteously; surgeons in the services very badly, and young practitioners not at all. For seven years' hard work in the Marylebone Dispensary he had received one guinea, and a very distinguished London assistant physician had found that his salary equalled that of the man who put the skid on the omnibus wheels at Holborn Hill.

He advised every one to resign at once any and every thought of becoming a medical man unless he possessed three qualifications:--First, independence; second, an aptitude and love for the profession; third, the readiness to pay a heavy premium in this world for his prospects of reward in the next.

_Punch_ expressed righteous indignation at the "generosity" with which an appreciative Government and a grateful Public were accustomed to requite the services of medical men. But the disparities of which Mr. Davy legitimately complained were nothing to those which have been common of late years. In 1920 the demonstrators in science at Oxford were getting just about the same pay as the Oxford road-sweepers. Attempts to disparage the social status of doctors were invariably resented by _Punch_, and when, in November, 1880, the Bishop of Liverpool, in a speech to medical men, observed "I am not ashamed to say I have a son a doctor," _Punch_ promptly retorted in the following epigram:--

How kind of the Bishop, and how patronizing, And yet to his _Punch_ 'tis a little surprising, That speaking to medical men there in session, He dared speak of shame and a noble profession. A Bishop looks after our souls, but how odd is The sneer that's implied at the curers of bodies. For surely it would be no hard task to fish up, A hundred brave Doctors as good as the Bishop.

[Sidenote: _Cremation and Comprehension_]

_Punch_, it will be remembered, had been a caustic critic of medical students of the Bob Sawyer type in the 'forties. But he made his _amende_ handsomely in 1886, when he acknowledged the change in the type and contrasted the serious and frugal modern student with the rowdy, bibulous sawbones of forty years before. Of irregular practitioners _Punch_ had always been a hostile critic, and even the orthodox members of the profession did not always escape a certain amount of genial satire, as when, in 1886, an eminent physician, feeling ill, declines to call in any doctor because "we all go in for thinking each other such humbugs." In this context it may be permissible to add to what has already been said on the subject of cremation, and _Punch's_ support of Sir Henry Thompson, that in 1874 there appeared the following mock "Grave-digger's Remonstrance" with that eminent surgeon:--

Who are you to be thieving The poor sexton's bread? How can we earn our living If you urn our dead?

_Punch_, always a strong advocate of comprehension, saw in cremation a means of breaking down the barriers erected between conformists and nonconformists by exclusive graveyards.

Turning to other callings and the social problems which they presented, we may note that the difficulty experienced by retired officers in finding suitable and remunerative employment had begun to attract attention in 1885. The suggestions made by Lord Napier of Magdala in that year did not meet with a sympathetic response from _Punch_, who, in a somewhat infelicitous burlesque, foreshadowed the strange results on hotel management of the employment of officers in various menial capacities. The hardships of the underpaid clergy and "ragged curates" are seldom referred to in this period. In 1889 we are introduced to a new type in the moustachioed, eye-glassed, but energetic curate, who observes, "My vicar's away. I preach three times on Sunday, and boss the entire show." Indulgence in slang by bishops, however, did not come in till more than thirty years later.

Social inversions are a frequent theme of comment. The new commercial Croesus expresses a contemptuous compassion for the "poor devils with fixed incomes." The Highlands are invaded by prosperous suburban tradesmen in kilts, and pen and pencil are enlisted to illustrate the embarrassments of the "New Poor," the altered balance between High and Low Life, and the comparative wealth of the working classes owing to their freedom from taxation and responsibilities. A notable sign of the times was the emergence of the American millionaire art collector. The first great ducal sale at Stowe dates back to 1848, but it was an isolated example and looked upon as almost a portent. In the 'eighties the depression of the landed interest led to further dispersion of treasures, beginning with the Duke of Hamilton's sale in 1882, and in 1889 the activity of American purchasers excited the laments of patriotic Frenchmen, echoed by _Punch_. There is, however, a good deal to be said on the other side when the American millionaire happens to be as enlightened and generous as the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan and his son. The influence of the "New Rich" in England on art only ministered to _Punch's_ sense of ridicule, happily exercised at the expense of _parvenus_ who bought books by the hundred yards or purchased faked "ancestral" portraits. These atrocities furnished congenial scope for the comments of Du Maurier's "Grigsby"--one of his most diverting creations--who plays the part of the facetious skeleton at the feasts of "Sir Pompey Bedell" and other self-satisfied plutocrats.

[Sidenote: _"Grigsby" on Family Portraits_]

_Punch's_ attitude to the French, it may be noted, had grown much more genial and appreciative after the war of 1870. This mellower temper reflected a general feeling, but it was due in part at least to the influence of Du Maurier, who had French blood in his veins and had studied art in Paris. He did not refrain from chaffing the French "sportman," but his satire was delicate and tempered by candour. For example, one need only point to the picture of the Englishman in France expostulating with his French artist friend at the caricatures of Englishwomen in the Parisian Press, and suddenly silenced by the inopportune appearance of a party of Englishwomen exactly bearing out the caricature! _Punch_ had no love of the English tourist on the Continent, and seldom failed to gibbet his inconsiderate angularity. He was no believer in globe-trotting as a means of promoting mutual understanding. But he was increasingly ready to admit that there were things which they managed better abroad, and to acknowledge that we might go very far astray if we formed our estimate of France on "_Les Français peints par eux mêmes_." Both nations have a way of putting their worst foot foremost, the one through shyness and reserve, the other through an excess of outspokenness, and Du Maurier's racial dualism made him an excellent interpreter of both failings.

Out of many miscellaneous features of this period we may single out the Japanese craze, a form of cheap æstheticism satirized by _Punch_ in the early 'eighties; the popularity of the banjo, honoured by more than one reference in 1886 when it appears among the luggage to be taken to the seaside; the fashion in huge St. Bernard dogs, beloved of Du Maurier, who yet recognized the absurdity of breeding gigantic types in one of his nightmare pictures in 1879; and the plague of recitation, faithfully dealt with in _Punch's_ admirable "Manual for Young Reciters." Christmas cards became fashionable in 1876; and _Punch_, as a sentimentalist, did not support the agitation against them as a "senseless extravagance" in 1878. The "Missing Word Competition" entered on its devastating career in 1892.

[Sidenote: "_Fin-de-Siècle_"]

As a symptom of the general speeding-up of life, and the resort to short cuts of all sorts in speech, as well as in action, one may note the appearance of a group of new words, of which "leaderette" and "sermonette" were the most notable until the arrival, many years later, of the "Suffragette." With the arrival of the 'nineties another formidable phrase, _fin-de-siècle_, sprang into prominence, and soon achieved a popularity that exasperated _Punch_ beyond the bounds of endurance:--

WANTED, A WORD-SLAYER

_Fin-de-siècle_! Ah, that phrase, though taste spurn it, I Fear, threatens staying with us to eternity. Who _will_ deliver Our nerves, all a-quiver, From that pest-term, and its fellow, "modernity"?

_Punch_ was much preoccupied with "modernity" and its numerous manifestations in these years, and his preoccupation took the form of a comprehensive series of "Modern Types," to which reference has already been made. Some of them will appear anything but modern to the Georgian reader, and, indeed, are not so much new as recurrent types--for example, the precocious undergraduate who gambles, drinks, fails in his schools, emigrates and dies miserably. The "Young Guardsman" is an eminently conventional portrait of a type which disappeared in the Great War, and is almost a libel on a Brigade whose social prestige is of infinitely less importance than its magnificent record of heroic achievement. The "Average Undergraduate" is in the main a handsome tribute to the public school system. He is not an Admirable Crichton, a Blue or a Scholar, but a decent fellow, truthful and ingenuous, who will always be a "useful member of the community." The tone of the whole series, however, is very far from ministering to national complacency. The bitterest of all these portraits is that of "The Adulated Clergyman," an effeminate, self-indulgent, insincere and unwholesome impostor, at all points a base variant of the type satirized in Thackeray's fashionable preacher, Charles Honeyman.

_Punch's_ handling of social pests and evils throughout this period is decidedly pessimistic. The frank verses on divorce by consent--or rather collusion--in 1886 are a legitimate criticism enough. But at times he quite overshoots the mark, as, for example, in the acrimonious and grotesque tirade against the House of Lords, published in December, 1883, under the heading of "The Speaker: A Handbook to Ready-made Oratory." After giving a few notes on the personal appearance of some "titled types," the writer continues:--

There is a motto which every Peer is supposed to adopt as a rule of life--"_noblesse oblige_." It is presumed that every bearer of a hereditary title, carrying with it a right to receive numberless Blue Books published at the expense of the Public, is willing, in virtue of his position, to please everyone. Now it gratifies the community at large to hear a Peer talking in public, and, as some Peers cannot talk in public, it may be as well to give the specimen of the sort of speech which would cause unlimited satisfaction in all quarters but the highest. Of course, the imaginary speaker is a myth--a foolish but frank Lord, with the courage of his opinions. Should such a person, however, be found, there would be no doubt about his popularity--again, in certain circles. It must be remembered that, as the speaker would be a Peer addressing Commoners, all his Lordship's remarks would be received with the deepest approval.

[Sidenote: "_Noblesse Oblige_!"]

Noble Orator (rising at the right of the Chairman). Gentlemen--(enthusiastic applause)--I am sure I must thank you for the honour you have conferred upon me. ("No, no!") Yes, it is an honour, because I believe I am verily the most uneducated dolt in all this brilliant assembly. (Cheers.) I am, indeed: and, although a great many of my peers--perhaps the majority--are highly respectable, still in my class you will discover many who resemble me in nearly every particular. (Applause.) As a lad I refused to learn anything, and could scarcely spell my name--certainly it was a long one--at fifteen. (Great cheering.) I was a dunce at school, and a cad at the University. (Frantic enthusiasm.) It is my great pride to remember that at this latter seat of learning I had the honour to burn half the College library, and to screw up the door to my tutor's apartments. (Roars of laughter.) But from this you must not imagine that I am fond of squandering. On the contrary, I audit my own butcher's book, and superintend the store-cupboard of my Lady's housekeeper. (Cheers.) I never go by a cab when I can take an omnibus, and if asked for a shilling by a genuinely starving beggar, would, after mature consideration, advance him a halfpenny on account, chargeable on approved security. (Cheers.) And yet I am very rich, enormously rich. (Renewed applause.) Many of the slums of the greatest city in the world belong to me. (Cheers.) And although slums are not pretty to look at or live in, they are good ones to pay. (Shouts of enthusiasm.) From this slight confession you may imagine that I am ignorant, vicious, mean, and grasping. (Prolonged cheering.) Well, I am all these, and more, for I am an ass into the bargain. (Thunders of applause.) Besides this, I have no birth to boast of. A hundred years ago or so, my great-grandfather swept a crossing, and his wife dealt in hare-and rabbit-skins. But what matter the past when we have the present before us! I am crassly ignorant and intolerably offensive, but I am a Lord. (Enormous enthusiasm.) And, as a Lord, I can give you what laws I please--("You can; you can!")--or never go near the House of Lords from one year's end to another. I generally adopt the latter course, except when the interest of my own class, or the gratification of a fad, cause me to perform my highly responsible duties. On these occasions, however, I take care that I represent none but myself. (A storm of applause.) Under these circumstances, as I am bored out of my life, and have just enough sense to see that I am a nuisance to everyone, inclusive of myself, I am sure you are glad that you are not me. "_Noblesse oblige_," I want to console you! (The noble speaker here resumed his seat amidst the wildest enthusiasm.)

Such a speech as the above would, no doubt, reconcile many listeners to cease to envy the Peerage, the more especially if they happened to be either Baronets of James the First's creation or members of the oldest (not the mushroom) county families.

[Sidenote: _Punch's Pessimism_]

The speaker was "imaginary," though the burning down half a College library was a true bill, and the ringleader in this exploit afterwards attained high rank as a politician. But these composite portraits are seldom satisfactory, and in this instance the resultant monstrosity ceases to be representative. The House of Lords was not exclusively composed of black sheep at any time, and on the whole more dangerous scoundrels have made their way into the elected House. But here, as so often happens, _Punch_ provides the antidote to his own bane. In 1886, under the heading "A Radical Snob," he reprints what Thackeray wrote in his own pages just forty years earlier:--

"Perhaps, after all, there's no better friend to Conservatism than your outrageous Radical Snob. When a man preaches to you that all Noblemen are tyrants, that all Clergymen are hypocrites or liars, that all Capitalists are scoundrels, banded together in an infamous conspiracy to deprive the people of their rights, he creates a wholesome revulsion of feeling in favour of the abused parties, and a sense of fair play leads the generous heart to take a side with the object of unjust oppression.

"The frantic dwarf ... becomes a most wicked and dangerous Snob when he gets the ear of people more ignorant than himself, inflames them with lies, and misleads them into ruin."

Yet, when all allowance has been made for inconsistency and extravagance, we cannot deny that a strongly marked vein of discontent and dissatisfaction--often too well-grounded--with the "scheme of things in general" runs through the pages of _Punch_ throughout these years, culminating in a dismal explosion of pessimism in March, 1884, over the decadence, the degeneracy and the vulgarity of the age:--

THE "ZEIT-GEIST"

Oh, for the Muse that laughed and stung On _Gulliver's_ indignant tongue! Curt was his speech and fierce and strong, In lofty scorn of Cant and Wrong,-- And small indeed the times that teach Weakness of grip for strength of speech, Craving once more that Muse to fire The chords of Satire's slackened lyre!

Oh, little day of little men, What themes invite the mocker's pen! What rush for wealth at any cost, Honour and Health defied and lost; What blatant parodies of Fame (That hardly won and noble name), Dragged in the sickly spectral lee Of sallow Notoriety; Ambition's highest aim to quaff The rinsings of a paragraph, And Life's whole purpose sunk and spent To furnish an advertisement! Oh, for some Juvenalian verse Thy sound and fury to rehearse, While Indignation pours the strain Which Nature may desire in vain.[9] Where'er the stifled spirit fly, What sights and sounds obscure the sky! The Statesman's cut-and-dried abuse, And frothy violence turned to use, Dead Christian hatreds spurred to life, To serve the ends of party strife; The Lawyer's pæans in his fees; The Actor's noisy juggleries, As every little journal tells Where last he shook the cap and bells; The Critic in his newest dress, _Sans_ scholarship or kindliness, With no credentials under Heaven For worthy work or asked or given, And nagging, after Insult's wont, At those who "do," for those who don't; Patriots by bravos hired and sung, For bright sword carrying fish-fag's tongue. The Poetaster's mixture, made Of pitch and darkness for a trade; The Man of Science, self-crowned King Of Learning and of everything, Serenely squatting on his throne, Fogged with conundrums of his own, And probing with his two-foot rod His muddy substitutes for God,-- While tambourines and banjos raise The Hymn of Noise for that of Praise; Our very island's sea-girt rock Risked to be land-bound into "stock"; Ay, even Woman's tarnished crown Hawked through the windows of the town, And all our sires held first and best In pufferies of all sizes dressed, Till England watch, through England's Press, The fall of English manliness!

Vexed soul, seek out some other shore; Houses are castles here no more; Vain in the penny-age to fly From all the penny-trumpetry: Or hide thee from the watchful zeal Of those who serve the weekly meal For jaded gluttons, keen to gloat On savoury sauce of Anecdote. Yet let nor cook nor eaters rue, The eaten seem to like it too, For in Society's new game Cooks, food, and eaters are the same, And Fashion, spider-like, supplies Her self-spun web to catch her flies!

Thou boastful "Spirit of the Time," Wake prose itself to angry rhyme! Soon shall the dark forbid the light To any hand with power to write, And the new myriad scribbling-race, Like locusts shroud all Sense's face, Rushing (where angels are not seen) Into the _Prigs' Own Magazine_, While Upper-Tens profusely scrawl In grammar from the servants' hall, Till Ink itself shall blush to tint Nothing but amateurs in print, And the true child of letters learn He has no space to breathe or turn, And scorn accept the Century's plan, That all may write, save those who can. I turn me, wearied, at my desk, From the last "thinker's" last burlesque The last Agnostic's windy plea That none knows anything, but he, In English carefully destroyed To hide his meaning's outer void; And, bowing to the wisdoms old, Read simpler lessons writ in gold: And would but in a single word The "Spirit of the Age" be heard, Let him take up his glass and see His image this--Vulgarity.

MARIUS.

[Footnote 9: "_Si Natura negat, facit indignatio versum._"]

[Sidenote: _The Spirit of the Time_]

What a list it is! The quest of notoriety, blatant advertisement, party rancour and sectarian strife, forensic greed, mummer-worship, incompetent and ungenerous criticism, fleshly poetry, the arrogance of science, "Corybantic Christianity," tarnished womanhood, the decay of manly fibre, prying journalism, amateurism in letters, windy Agnosticism, with vulgarity enthroned as high priestess of the age! Modern Juvenals, when they are Jeremiahs into the bargain, are not exhilarating companions. Here _Punch_ saw life in England neither steadily nor whole, and made the mistake, not surprising in a Londoner, of confounding the extravagances, the eccentricities and the vices of London coteries and cliques, and, above all, of her idle rich, with the tone and temper of the nation at large. "Smart" London Society did not represent England or even London. But _Punch_ spoke with many voices, and in the "Voces Populi," with which, towards the end of this period, Mr. Anstey had begun to refresh and rejoice the hearts of his readers, you will find an agreeable corrective of the unqualified pessimism of "Marius." The "people" whose "voices" are recorded were often ridiculous, vulgar and semi-educated, but they were not corrupt or degenerate. Twenty years later the extravagances castigated by "Marius" were even more pronounced, but were confined to the same limited though highly advertised circles. Yet many of those who seemed most wedded to self-indulgence were capable of a noble regeneration in the hour of their country's need. And outside these circles there was, in 1884, as at a later date, a great if unobtrusive throng of men and women who stood in the authentic line of the heroes and heroines of the past, only waiting for an opportunity to prove themselves the inheritors of their spirit.

RECREATION, SPORT, AND PASTIME

The second half of the nineteenth century was not only notable for the organization of Labour. It was also the age of the organization of Recreation, the age of Exhibitions. The Exhibition of 1851 was a serious affair in which entertainment was subordinated to the demands of Commerce, Industry and Science. The series of Exhibitions which marked the decade of the 'eighties, though their names and their avowed aims were serious, practical or scientific, were run with an ever increasing tendency to emphasize the spectacular element, to cater for the amusement and entertainment (in all senses) of the public.

_Punch_ summarized this tendency happily enough in the phrase that he applied to the possibilities of the Imperial Institute--"Commerce _v._ Cremorne." He had already deplored the decline of institutions, such as the Crystal Palace, which beginning with high educational aims, had come to rest their popular appeal on dangerous acrobatics and freak performances. He was even more outspoken in his comments on the degeneracy of the Aquarium at Westminster in 1879 and 1880.

References to "Zazel," the acrobat who was nightly shot from a cannon, and to Zazel's successor, "Zæo," abound in protests not only against the enterprising manager, and the cynical indifference of the Home Secretary, but above all against the public who went simply because of the risk, the chance of seeing accidents. "Zazel's" performance, as a matter of fact, was not as dangerous as it appeared; it proved a theme of fruitful burlesque on the part of Nellie Farren at the Gaiety Theatre; and when it was rumoured that Zazel was going to marry an Archdeacon, _Punch_ did not refrain from a ribald allusion to her passing "out of the mouth of a Canon into the arms of an Archdeacon." At the same time he was equally critical of the ostentatiously labelled "Entertainments for the People" organized as a sort of compromise between High Art, the Penny Reading and the Variety Stage. The efforts of the Kyrle Society to "bring Beauty home to the working-classes" left him cold or facetiously intolerant of patronizing preciosity. So, too, the performances at the Victoria Coffee Music-Hall in 1881 are damned with less than faint praise in a criticism put into the mouth of one of the class they were intended to reach, on the grounds that they were not only teetotal, but third-rate music-hall, and dull at that. The whole thing was spoiled by an atmosphere of conscious edification and of condescending patronage.

_Punch's_ attitude to the series of annual exhibitions which began with the "Fisheries" in 1883, underwent many phases. It began in hope and mild praise, but ended in disillusion, as the side-shows, _al fresco_ entertainments, bands and illuminations, and the everlasting "Welcome Club," became the stereotyped and dominating attractions of each successive show. _Punch_ wanted the site of the Fisheries made into a permanent Public Garden with a shilling gate money. But while he applauded the good intention of the promoters, he represented the West End fishmonger as "none the worse for it": the price of fish had not come down as it was thought it would.

[Sidenote: _Exhibition Absurdities_]

The "Healtheries" and "Inventories" followed in 1884 and 1885, and _Punch's_ verdict was that "The Fisheries and the Healtheries were very much the same, especially the Inventories." The Colonial and Indian Exhibition (the "Colinderies" as _Punch_ christened it) in 1886 prompts the usual mock-serious account of the opening ceremony. Some distrust was excited by the suggestion of the Prince of Wales that the Exhibition should be given a permanent existence as an Imperial Institute, to be founded as a Jubilee Memorial, and _Punch_ gave his blessing to a proposal which was carried into effect. The subsequent history of the Imperial Institute affords an interesting commentary on the fear, expressed by _Punch_ in 1888, that it would degenerate into another popular Exhibition, with bands, side-shows, etc. He regarded it at the moment as "a big-sounding name, signifying nothing; to conjure with but nothing more"; and some of the names of the organizing committee filled him with astonishment at the ineptitude of their choice.

Buffalo Bill's "Wild West" Show in West Kensington in 1887 struck a somewhat new note. _Punch_ was impressed by the buck-jumping, but the rest smelt too much of footlights and sawdust, and he asks, "Why should Noble Savages be always beaten by the Cowboys?" Still "Buffalo Bill" was a picturesque figure, with a not undistinguished record of active service; the Queen's visit is appropriately described in the "Hiawatha" metre, and Du Maurier, in a spirited fantasy, hints that the introduction of a team of buck-jumping ponies would brighten the monotonous decorum of the meets of the Four-in-Hand Club.

The absurdities of the annual Exhibitions did not escape _Punch_ in their earlier days. At the "Healtheries" he describes a representation of a street in Old London, in which there was a girl in Tudor costume selling photographs! The strange miscellaneous international exhibitions which followed the first four were rich in material for ridicule. A prominent attraction at the Anglo-Danish Exhibition of 1888 was a "grotto of Mystery," consisting chiefly of skeletons. At the Italian Exhibition which followed, the great feature was the "Triumph of Titus," a representation of a gladiatorial contest, and chariot races by "wild omnibus horses." The sons of Belial, as represented by Master Freddy, who was disappointed because "they didn't have lions and--and real martyrs," were dissatisfied, but Mr. Anstey in his "Voces Populi" had a glorious time.

Ridicule predominates in the notice of the Spanish Exhibition in 1889, and in the same year _Punch_ devoted a special number to the Paris Exhibition, containing the impressions of his staff, and bristling with references to the Eiffel Tower, Paulus, the comic singer, and other delights. In 1889 also Barnum returned, "the greatest Showman," in _Punch's_ opinion, "of this or any other age"; and the autobiographic speech which he made on the occasion of the opening of his show at Olympia prompted _Punch_ to revive old memories:--

Forty-five years ago Albert Smith wrote in Bentley's _Miscellany_ a paper entitled "A Go-a-head Day with Barnum." The article wound up by saying: "As we expressed our fatigue at supper, Barnum said, 'Well, I don't know what you call work in England; but if you don't make thirty hours out of the twenty-four in Merekey, I don't know where you'd be at the year's end. If a man can't beat himself in running, he'll never go ahead; and if he don't go ahead, he's done.'" The Great Barnum is apparently as active in 1889 as he was in 1844. He is as enthusiastic on the wrong side of eighty as he was on the right side of forty. If he has not beaten himself in running, he has allowed no one to beat him. He has caught most people, but the old bird himself has never yet been caught. If you look in just now at Olympia, you will find him up to time and smiling, and going ahead more than ever.

The last and one of the very best of the Exhibitions in this period that I have to record was held at Chelsea in 1891. _Punch_ renders justice to the Royal Naval Exhibition in light-hearted style, but "Robert, the City Waiter," is righteously indignant that none but German waiters were employed.

The increasing predominance of pastime throughout this period is faithfully illustrated in the pages of _Punch_. It is true that he never was much of a racing man, though always ready to find parallels in the classic events for political situations, and, as we have noted elsewhere, anxious to safeguard the privileges of the equestrian. But hunting and fishing cuts are far less frequent than in the days of Leech and Mr. Briggs, and in 1881 we find _Punch_ lamenting the degeneracy of modern sports-big battues, champagne luncheons on the moors, the lavish refreshment of the shooters and the facile butchery of tame birds.

[Sidenote: _Futile Feats_]

In 1882 we meet a series of sporting illustrations from the victims' point of view--e.g., a coursing match as envisaged by the hare with a crowd of yelling "sportsmen" looking on. _Punch_ had respected and admired the pugilists of the old school, but here, again, he found signs of decadence. In 1890 Slavin, an Australian, fought Jem Smith in France, and the crowd intervened and ill-treated the former, who won. _Punch_ treats the affair in a neo-Virgilian episode (somewhat in the style of his lay on the Sayers-Heenan contest), which takes the form of a dialogue between "Punchius" and "Sayerius" in the Elysian Fields; and when _Punch_, after narrating the fight, asks the shade of Sayers what he thought of it, Sayers thinks the sooner the P.R. is put down the better. The craze for contests for futile endurance met with no encouragement from _Punch_. When swimming for women was advocated in the _Medical Press and Circular_ in 1878, _Punch_ printed a letter on "Maids and Mermaids" in the style and over the signature of "William Cobbett" vigorously recommending this exercise. But a year or so later, when Miss Beckwith swam for a hundred hours in a tank, _Punch_ registered a vehement protest against these "agony-point Amusements." The spectacle of a girl of eighteen floundering in a tank for a hundred hours at a stretch was to him as objectless as it was penitential, as ungraceful as it was degrading. The exploits of Gale, the pedestrian, at Lillie Bridge in 1880 only disgusted _Punch_, who marvelled at the folly of the promoters of a "stupid, cruel, degrading piece of tomfoolery" in sending him tickets to witness it. "I knew," he says, "that were a horse treated as this man consented to be treated, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would interfere. But there's no Royal Society and no power in the world that can prevent a man making an ass of himself if he chooses to do so." Even in the noble sport of mountaineering _Punch_ found symptoms of a vainglorious love of self-advertisement. His tribute to Mr. Whymper in 1880 is decidedly two-edged. Under title of "Excelsior, Excelsissimus" _Punch_ salutes his achievements with a strong undercurrent of satire, suggesting, e.g., that he should "change his name from Whymper to Crow and take for his crest a Chanticleer _struttant_, _chantant_ on a mountain reduced to a molehill." _Punch_ winds up on the same disparaging note;--

If ever a Gentleman was entitled to advertise himself as "in the perpetual Snow line," Whymper is the man, a self with no Company. We propose that the Empire he has so proudly assisted over the old-established inaccessibilities of the world should be recognized as a higher form of Imperialism--Whymperialism.

The overdoing of athletics at schools is a favourite topic in these years, but on the whole _Punch_ acquiesced in the new and formidable organization of pastimes of all sorts that went on in the 'seventies and 'eighties. He saw nothing but wholesome rivalry in contests with the Dominions. The early visits of the Australian cricket teams are dealt with at great length. In 1878, the year of Spofforth's "demoniacal" exploits, we read how,

The Australians came down like a wolf on the fold, The Mary'bone cracks for a trifle were bowled; Our Grace before dinner was very soon done, And our Grace after dinner did not get a run.

Criticism was not wanting, but it was not directed against the visitors. At the close of the season _Punch_ gives wholesome advice to English cricketers to repair their bad taste, bad management and bad play, and the advice is not without its point in 1921. _Punch_ had already adapted Byron for his purpose; now he turned to Campbell:--

The Cricketers of England! They yet may have their turn, When pique, and fuss, and funk depart And good pluck and luck return. Meanwhile, ye smart Australian lads, Our parting cup shall flow To the fame of your name, Who have laid our wickets low; Who have bowled great Grace, and scored from Shaw, And laid all our wickets low!

[Sidenote: _Dr. W. G. Grace_]

In the valedictory lines a week later _Punch_ wishes the Australians godspeed on their homeward journey, with special mention of Spofforth, Gregory, Bannerman, Blackham and Boyle. They returned in 1880, and the match at the Oval inspired the usual Lion and Kangaroo cut. W. G. Grace made 152 and Murdoch 153, but England won. _Punch_ celebrates the heroic contest in the manner of Macaulay. "W. G." was now one of _Punch's_ special heroes. He had even in 1878 bracketed him with Mr. Gladstone in "The Two W. G.'s" (based on "The Two Obadiahs," a popular song of the hour), and in July, 1880, the verses on "Grace: an Ode à la mode," are a good picture of W. G. in his large mastery of the grand style:--

Praxiteles should have sculped thee, not that thou Art slim, soft-moulded, sleek-limbed, epicene, Nay, faith, but swart, square-shouldered, stalwart, keen, With bellying shirt back-blown and beaded brow, Brawny bat-gripping hands, and crisp-curled beard As black as Vulcan's own.

[Sidenote: _Two Views of Lord's_]

In 1888 when Grace made 215 runs at Brighton _Punch_ saluted him as "my black-bearded, cricketing Titan," and in 1889 he figures in a fancy portrait as "The Leviathan Bat" with scores on his wings. From 1880 onwards notices of matches abound; Eton and Harrow, and the Canterbury Week in 1881, and in 1882 Southey is laid under contribution to celebrate the "famous victory" of Australia at the Oval with Spofforth as hero of the occasion. Surrey _v._ Notts in 1887 inspires a column of verses from an enthusiastic Surreyite with due praise of W. W. Read, K. J. Key and the exhilarating and intrepid George Lohmann. But even in these years _Punch_ had his moments of misgiving, his cold as well as his hot fits. The lines professing to bewail the feminine invasion of man's last stronghold in pastime--cricket--in 1884, are facetious, or semi-ironical. Women had competed in croquet, roller-skating and lawn tennis, and man had successively yielded these various fields of pastime, hoping to retain the mastery of the cricket field, now threatened. But the verses on "Lord's" in the same year contain a serious and even ponderous indictment of the fetish-worship of athleticism, "the Muscle-Cultus forced into a fever," with a lurid portrait of the "adipose Old Blue," and the decline of the popular compiler of centuries into that "unvirile _vaurien_ a Town-dangler" with no profession, no intellectual resources, no interests save his own past. Yet in the very next year _Punch_ glorified Lord's in an illustration of the Pavilion crowded with portraits of cricketing celebrities--"W. G.," I. D. Walker, A. J. Webbe, Lord Harris, A. P. Lucas, C. J. Thornton, Alfred Lyttelton, A. G. Steel, C. T. Studd, etc. Whether this was intended as an _amende_ or not, I cannot say, but it was certainly a considerable advertisement.

Passing on to 1892, we find that _Punch_ was petrified in that year by the exploits of "Ranji," who scored eleven centuries in that season. His laudatory ode, however, is largely taken up with efforts to wrestle with the spelling and pronunciation of the hero's name, for the now familiar abbreviation had not been generally adopted.

Cricket was still the national pastime _par excellence_, but new rivals were already creeping up. Lawn tennis, even in 1878, had ceased to be the monopoly of fashionable circles; it was already invading the suburbs. In 1885 _Punch_ sang, after Tennyson,

For other games may come and go, Lawn Tennis lives for ever.

Two years later Du Maurier satirized the social importance attached to the stars of the "Lawn-Tennis world." Football was not yet regarded, by _Punch_ at any rate, as a serious competitor. Professionalism was as yet in its infancy. _Punch_ greeted the Maori team which visited England in 1888, and complimented them on their successes over Surrey and Kent:--

Your kicking, brother Maoris, Has given us the kick; You're well matched all, well "on the ball," And strong, and straight, and quick. By Jove, this is a rum age, When a New Zealand team Licks Bull at goal and scrummage! It beats Macaulay's dream.

You're welcome, brother Maoris, Here's wishing you good luck! With you there pace and power is, And skill, and lots of pluck. A trifle "rough." Why, just so! But that you'll mend, no doubt, And win, all Sportsmen trust so, In many a friendly bout.

[Sidenote: _Baseball Arrives_]

The allusion to rough play is not an isolated mention; John Bull is shown protesting in the same month (October, 1888) against "this brutal sort of thing," in a cut in which the players are arrayed in knee-breeches and long stockings; and a year later two football players, after losing the match, are shown carrying off the referee in a bag. Lacrosse was already acclimatized in England in the early 'eighties, and the visit of the Toronto Club in 1888 gave impetus to a fine game which has never seriously threatened the popularity of cricket and football.

The American baseball team who came over in the spring of 1889 not only failed to impress _Punch_, they excited him to hostile and unsympathetic comment on a game which he didn't understand and didn't want to. Still, he had the grace to admit that he was a prejudiced spectator; also that the players were as agile as cats and threw like catapults. He had not the vision to foresee a time when "baseball results" would be a daily feature of the tape and an Exalted Personage would be credited with the confession that he thought it was a better game to watch than cricket, adding, however, "for goodness' sake, don't say that I said so, or there might be a Revolution."

[Sidenote: _Lawn Tennis v. Golf_]

Pastime was not only being organized, systematized, commercialized. It was beginning to be the subject of serious literary and scientific study. The _Badminton Library_ series dates from 1885, when the first three volumes were published. _Punch_ made excellent fun of the Duke of Beaufort's preface, repeated in each volume, with its glowing account of the Prince of Wales's accomplishments as a sportsman, and of the literary lapses of the Duke and his editors. The volume on Golf, by Horace Hutchinson, with contributions by Mr. Balfour and Andrew Lang, certainly did not lay itself open to this rebuke. It was a delightful tribute to the charm of a pastime which had invaded England seriously in the 'eighties. Golf had been played sporadically in the south ever since the days of James I. But until the 'eighties, the golfer was looked upon as a species of lunatic. _Punch's_ first notable acknowledgment of the fascinations of the Royal and Ancient Game dates from 1885, when Du Maurier in "The Golf Stream" shows the stream of all ages and both sexes that "flows along the Eastern Coast of Scotland during the summer and autumn."

The jealousy of the votaries of other pastimes is made vocal in Keene's lawn-tennis player, who sees no fun in a game which consists in "knockin' a ball into a bush and then 'untin' about for it." Even in 1890 Du Maurier represents the newcomer in an invidious light when he makes a weedy little man say to an Amazonian lady lawn-tennis player that "golf is the only game for _men_ nowadays. Lawn tennis is only for girls." _Punch_ prophesied more truly in the verses, "Golf Victor!" at the close of the same year. There it is the ladies who say, "Golf is the game for the girls":--

Henceforward, then, Golf is the game for the fair-- At home, and abroad, or in pastures Colonial, And the shouts of the ladies will quite fill the air For the Links that will turn into bonds Matrimonial, And for husbands our daughters in future will seek With the powerful aid of the putter and cleek!

In 1892 the confessions of the "Duffer" at Golf after forty years' experience are interesting from the classified gradations of competence:--

The Learned have divided golf into several categories. There is Professional golf, the best Amateur golf, enthusiasts' golf, golf, Beginners' golf, Ladies' golf, Infant golf, Parlour golf, the golf of Scotch Professors. But the true Duffer's Golf is far, far below that. The born Duffer is incurable. No amount of odds will put him on the level of even Scotch Professors.

To-day these categories need revising; the ladies have gone up two or three classes; amateurs have not for the first time held their own with the best professionals, and even the infants are becoming formidable.

Mentions of cycling in the 'eighties are mainly confined to the tricycle. There is a strange picture of a kind of tricycle for four in 1882. Du Maurier's Pillion-Bicycle is a romantic anticipation of the "Flapper-rack" of a later age. The four chapters on "Cyclomania" in 1885, including an account of a "spin" to Brighton ending in a smash, are largely burlesque, but indicate that, though clubs were multiplying, the cult had not yet outgrown its fashionable phase, or established itself on a democratic basis.

Signs of advancing popularity, however, are manifest in 1887, when the old Scotswoman in Keene's picture observes: "Ah dinna ken what's come ower the Kirk. Ah canna bide to see our Minister spankin' aboot on yon cyclopaedy!" The publication of a new edition of Mr. Sturmey's _Handbook of Bicycling_ in the same year inspires a set of verses reviewing the immense progress made since the days of the old "bone-shaker," the expansion of the industry at Coventry, and the exploits on the racing track of Keen and other professionals. The safety bicycle associated with the name of J. K. Starley dates from 1885, but it was not until the invention of the pneumatic tyre by Dunlop in 1888 that what had been a pastime was revolutionized and became an universal mode of locomotion. _Punch_ celebrates the coming of the "Safety" in October, 1890, in "Breaking a record on the Wheel" (after Tennyson's "Break, break"), but his admiration of the exploits of Messrs. Mecredy and Osmond is tempered by regret for the heroes of the "ordinary"--Keen and the Hon. Ion Keith Falconer. _Punch_ was not aware that he was in the presence of an epoch-making invention, the most wide-reaching in its influence in our time between the railway engine and the coming of the motor. The verses make no mention of the pneumatic tyre; the present writer saw a bicycle race in 1891 at Eastbourne at which all the competitors save one rode on the high model, and he proved the winner.

[Sidenote: _The Vicissitudes of Pastime_]

In contrast with the ever-increasing speeding-up of life one may note _Punch's_ tribute in 1889 to the charms of caravanning; its inevitable slowness being compensated by freedom from hotel bandits and extortionate lodging-house keepers.

Rifle-shooting is a serious pursuit rather than a pastime or sport, but may claim a word of notice in this survey. The National Rifle Association came of age in 1881, and _Punch_ celebrated the event in a cartoon in which he toasts a handsome young rifleman in a Jeroboam of Perrier-Jouet, 1859, and in verses congratulating the comrades of the rifle on their long survival and triumph over official snubbing.

Lastly I may note that in the Jubilee number of _Punch_ in 1891 the popular or rather fashionable recreations in the 'sixties, 'seventies, 'eighties and 'nineties are shown in four illustrations of croquet, roller-skating, lawn tennis and golf. Of these roller-skating has temporarily disappeared. In the 'seventies "Rinkomania" was a short-lived but acute malady. It led to a good many accidents and much speculation, mostly disastrous. Much money was made and more lost by the financiers who embarked on rink-building. At the end of 1875 _Punch_ notes a report that the Albert Hall was to be converted into a Grand Skating Rink. At the moment the rumour was by no means incredible; and the scenes of social and political revelry enacted in that building of recent years must have often disturbed the _manes_ of its eponymous hero.

Lawn tennis and golf have become democratic, international and spectacular pastimes; while croquet continues to hold its own in a select, scientific and secluded circle of votaries.

FASHION IN DRESS

Men's dress had already ceased to be decorative long before the 'seventies were in their mid career. There had been spasmodic attempts to introduce a note of colour and picturesqueness into male attire, and a fresh effort was made by the apostles of the æsthetic movement, but the average man of fashion took no heed of these eccentricities. His aim was to be unobtrusively well dressed, though in the domain of pastime one may note an increasing addiction to highly coloured hose and the multiplication of club colours and ribbons.

As a chronicler and illustrator of the vagaries of Mode, _Punch_ continues to pay far more attention to the costume of women than of men. But here also one notes a change--a tendency which warrants the labelling of this period as the Age of Approximation, in which in regard both to material and design women were more and more inclined to take a leaf from the fashion books of their brothers. The increasing addiction of girls to athletic pastimes was no doubt largely responsible for a change which could not be better exemplified than in Du Maurier's picture in 1877 of an old gentleman who mistakes the Dean's three daughters for young men and is gravely corrected by the verger. The mistake was venial, for the young amazons in their ulsters and hard hats presented a decidedly masculine appearance. In a word, they were "tailor-made"--a word of vast and epoch-making significance.

[Sidenote: _The Divided Skirt_]

References to this approximation recur throughout the 'eighties. In 1880 Sambourne, taking for his text an article in the _Journal des Modes_, gives us a design of evening dress entitled, "Man or Woman--a Toss Up," and in the same year Du Maurier, in a picture of the "_Ne Plus_ Ulster," represents a customer expostulating with the shop-woman, "But it makes one look so like a man," only to be told, "That's just the beauty of it, Miss." Within limits _Punch_ applauded the change. When short dresses for dances were said to be coming in, in the same year, he dilates in verse on the salutary innovation. To the year 1881 belongs the foundation of the "Rational Dress Society." "Bloomerism," as I pointed out in an earlier volume, never appealed to Mayfair. But the Rational Dress Society claimed a live Viscountess--Lady Harberton--as its President, and recommended the adoption of a "dual garmenture" or "divided skirt" as its cardinal tenet. _Punch_ declared that the "divided skirt" was simply the old Bloomer costume slightly disguised, and saw in the movement only a fresh proof of woman's conscious inferiority:--

True that another skirt hides this insanity Miss Mary Walker in old days began; Yet it should flatter our masculine vanity, For this means simply the trousers of Man!

The Rational Dress reformers were tremendously in earnest, but they entirely failed to convert the fashionables, and _Punch_, who refused to take them seriously, ridiculed the movement in a burlesque cut of "United Trousers _v._ Divided Skirts," in which retaliation effects a _reductio ad absurdum_. An exhibition of Rational Dress was held in Prince's Hall in the summer of 1883, but _Punch_ remained unconvinced, and even obscurantist in his comments:--

We look at the models--they puzzle our noddles-- Regarding them all with alarm and surprise! Each artful customer revives Mrs. Bloomer, And often produces an army of guys. The costume elastic, the dresses gymnastic, The wonderful suits for the tricycle-ess-- Though skirts be divided, I'm clearly decided, It isn't my notion of Rational Dress!

See gowns hygienic, and frocks calisthenic, And dresses quite worthy a modern burlesque; With garments for walking, and tennis, and talking, All terribly manful and too trouseresque! And habits for riding, for skating, or sliding, With "rational" features they claim to possess; The thought I can't banish, they're somewhat too mannish, And not quite the thing for a Rational Dress!

Note robes there for rinking, and gowns for tea-drinking, For yachting, for climbing, for cricketing too; The dresses for boating, the new petticoating, The tunics in brown and the trousers in blue. The fabrics for frockings, the shoes and the stockings, And corsets that ne'er will the figure compress; But in the whole placeful there's little that's graceful And girlish enough for a Rational Dress!

'Tis hardy and boyish, not girlful and coyish-- We think, as we stroll round the gaily-dight room-- A masculine coldness, a brusqueness, a boldness, Appears to pervade all this novel costume! In ribbons and laces, and feminine graces, And soft flowing robes, there's a charm more or less-- I don't think I'll venture on dual garmenture, I fancy my own is the Rational Dress.

[Sidenote: _Punch the "Anti-Rationalist"_]

Strong-minded women, in _Punch's_ view, only emphasized their angularity by the masculinity of their attire--witness his "Aunt Jemima," an uncompromising Blue Ribbonite, in an ulster and hard felt hat, explaining to a French cab-driver that the extra half-franc is a "_pour-manger_" and not a "_pour-boire_." The allusion to corsets in the lines quoted above may be supplemented by a paragraph which appeared early in 1891 showing that the "rationalizing" of dress had spread to the Dominions. At Sydenham, Ontario, corsets had been declared, in a memorable phrase, to be "incompatible with Christianity." To the end of this period _Punch_ discourages the extremes of the "Rational" school. His wittiest criticism is the paradoxical remark put in the mouth of one girl who disapproves of the mannish costume of a friend in a covert coat with a man's hat: "It makes you look like a Young Man, you know, and that's so effeminate!" The small deer-stalking cap worn by the lady, salmon fishing with a formidable gillie, in 1885, is identical with that worn by the male sportsman. The ulsters and "golf-capes," worn by women when travelling, and the narrow-brimmed felt hats shown in 1891, are practically identical for men and women; and in 1892 _Punch_ laments (after Herrick) the introduction of the loose "sack" coat, in imitation of the masculine model:--

Whenas my Julia wears a sack, That hides the outline of her back, I cry in sore distress, Alack!

Later on in the same poem his clothes philosophy is summed up in six lines:--

Although men's clothes are always vile-- The coat, the trousers and the "tile"-- Some sense still lingers in each style.

But women's garments should be fair, All graceful, gay, and debonair, And if they lack good sense, why care?

[Sidenote: _Slaves of Fashion_]

In the last three lines we find the whole essence and spirit of Du Maurier's method. He proved to demonstration again and again that women could dress in the fashion of the moment and be delightful to look at, so long as they were the judicious interpreters and not the Slaves of Mode. If he saw no beauty in the designs of the "Rationalists," and habitually ridiculed the sprawling attitudes, the shapeless garments, and unwholesome languor of the female "æsthetes," he did not spare the monstrosities and barbarities of the ultra-fashionables. The age of lateral expansion had given place to a craze for compression, to the "eel-skin" model. Skirts were so tight in 1875 that Du Maurier suggests that upholsterers should devise a special sort of chair suited to the peculiar exigencies of ladies who can neither stoop nor sit down. Three years later a lady and a hussar officer at a dance are depicted as both equally unable to depart from a rigidly perpendicular attitude. Tight lacing was again in fashion but met with no approval from _Punch_. In 1877 Du Maurier depicts a lady resolutely determined to lace down to the waist measurement of a rival, and _Punch_ quotes with approval Miss Frances P. Cobbe's indictment of the causes which led to the "Little Health of Women." Besides tight lacing the list includes the neglect of exercise, the discouragement of appetite, sentimental brooding over disappointments, the lack of healthy occupation for mind and body, false hair, bonnets that don't protect the head, heavy dragging skirts, high heels and "pull-backs"--a tolerably comprehensive catalogue. _Punch_ renews his attack on tightly-laced pinched-in figures in his Horatian ode to "A Modern Pyrrha" in 1880, and in 1889 Jones, after offering the wasp-waisted Miss Vane tea and strawberries at a garden party, remarks to himself: "By Jove! she takes 'em--she's going to swallow 'em! But where she'll put 'em--goodness knows!"

The crusade against wearing birds' wings is an old story. The Baroness Burdett-Coutts' efforts in 1875--cordially supported by _Punch_--were prompted by the cruel practice of obtaining rare feathers by plucking birds when alive. The Baroness had approached Mme. Louise, who was sympathetic but pointed out that there was an increasing demand for this kind of decoration. _Punch_ repeatedly protests against the practice, and in 1889, when flowers were once more in fashion as hat trimmings, expressed his delight at a change which checked wholesale bird slaughter:--

When lovely woman stooped to folly, And piled bird plumes upon her head, She no doubt fancied she looked jolly, But filled the woodland choirs with dread.

His delight, however, was short-lived, and in 1892 he was again moved to denounce the "Modish Moloch of the Air," and pillory, under the title of "A Bird of Prey," the woman of fashion who decked herself out in feathers.

[Sidenote: _Fringes and Bustles_]

This was the age of the fringe, another of _Punch's_ pet aversions, whether worn by 'Arriet or the maidens and matrons of Mayfair. Du Maurier lent his aid in the triple cut headed "Alas!" representing "Pretty Grandmamma Robinson" as she was in 1851, as she is now in 1880, in a tight dress cut low in front with a monstrous frizzed fringe, and finally as she might and should be--altogether a most instructive sermon on the art of growing old gracefully and the reverse.

It is interesting to note, by way of contrast, that caps were still worn in the house by quite young married women. The affectation of perennial youth was not universal in 1880. The popularity and drawbacks of the jersey are attested in the same year, when we are shown the fearful struggles of Jones in his efforts to help his lovely wife to divest herself of this garment. In 1881 reference is made to the agitation against a revival of the crinoline. The successful stand made against the "crinolette" by the Princess of Wales in 1883 is alluded to elsewhere. _Punch_ declares that the very large fans used at this time were almost as great a nuisance in the stalls as crinoline had been, but this is obviously a gross exaggeration. The red veils which were introduced in 1884 were to him a sheer abomination. "It makes girls look blear-eyed and red-nosed. It gives them the appearance of just recovering from the measles."

In the same year the ultra-smart ladies are shown wearing hats, while others still have bonnets. In 1886 Du Maurier shows ladies in a brougham specially built to match the fashion of hats with high conical crowns. The small fur capes of a few years back give place in 1887 to long fur boas--so long that one picture shows a lady walking between two men with the ends of her boa round their necks.

A more formidable monstrosity of these years was the "bustle," admirably criticized by the fisherman in Du Maurier's picture. By 1889 _Punch_ celebrated its departure along with other excrescences in a parody of Browning:--

EVELYN'S HOPE

The hideous bustle at last is dead. Come and talk of the beast a minute! Never again will it flourish, it's said; What on earth we women saw in it, Or why we liked it, is hard to discover; Only the world is a nicer place, Now that the pest called a "dress-improver" Is improved, by Fashion, right off its face.

There's the tall hat, too, which they say is doomed. One rather liked it, or viewed it with awe, Till one sat in a theatre, and far away loomed A rampart of feathers, frilling, and straw, Hiding the stage, the footlights, and all, Save perhaps the top of a paste-board tree; Oh, then one's fingers did certainly crawl To fling a book at the filigree!

But, some day, in Fashion's whirligig, The monstrous bustle, the Eiffel hat, May arise once more, even twice as big, For our great-grandchildren to wonder at. Well, that's Posterity's matter, not mine. The one thing now is to put up a hymn Of praise, and of hope that, when new suns shine, Good taste may flourish instead of whim!

[Sidenote: _Æsthetic Children_]

In 1891 a new fashion of dressing hair in the "teapot handle" style arose and was pronounced by _Punch_ to be "frightful," and the epithet is at least justified by _Punch's_ caricature.

Throughout this period the children in Du Maurier's pictures, however dressed, are a joy to look at. The fashion of arraying them in "æsthetic" costumes meets, however, with no favour. It is even implied that such a garb impairs their manners and conduces to arrogance, witness Du Maurier's picture of the young Cimabue Browns putting out their tongues in derision at ordinary normally clad children in the park. In 1881 we read:--

The poor little Guys who have been compelled by unthinking parents to walk about in long skirts, antique cloaks, and coal-scuttle bonnets, have caused so much laughter that the dress is now called "The Grinaway Costume."

It may have been by _Punch_; but against his churlish condemnation must be set the enthusiastic approval of Kate Greenaway's illustrations by leading art critics, including Ruskin, throughout the world; and the extraordinary success of her revival of old-fashioned costumes for children. In spite of _Punch_, and in virtue of the exquisite charm of her designs, she went a long way toward justifying the verdict of one of her admirers that "Kate Greenaway dressed the children of two continents."

[Sidenote: _The Demon "Topper"_]

Allusions to men's attire in this period are few and far between, and a careful study of _Punch's_ illustrations reveals little substantial divergence between the fashions of 1880 and 1920. The only approach to a crusade or campaign in which _Punch_ engaged was directed against his old enemy the "chimney pot." When Dr. Carpenter in 1882 declared that Englishmen "would rather suffer martyrdom than give up its use," _Punch_ enlarged on this text in an "anti-sanitary ballad." He reverts to the theme in "All round my hat" in 1889:--

Incarnate ugliness, bald, tasteless, flat, My stove-pipe hat! A rigid cylinder that engirts My cranium close, and heats, and hurts My head most frightfully. It cuts, it chafes, it raises lumps, Each vein beneath it throbs and thumps Fiercely and spitefully; An Incubus of woe, and yet I wear it And grin and bear it.

Its pipy structure, black and hollow, Would make a guy of bright Apollo, Clapt on his crown. It takes one's top-locks clean away, And turns the scanty remnant grey, Once thick and brown. And oh! how terrible its torrid tether In sultry weather!

Ever the same, though fashion's whim Wide-bell the body, curl the brim, Or more or less; Play little tricks with shape or size, And Yankeefy or Quakerize Design or dress, Long, short, broad, narrow, curled this way or that, 'Tis still a hat!

The centenary of the tall-hat (according to the _Daily News_) arrived in 1890, and _Punch_ heaped scorn on this unlovely centenarian:--

Mad was the hatter who invented The demon "topper," and demented The race that, spite of pain and jeers, Has borne it--for One Hundred Years!

For holiday or sporting wear Tyrolese hats came into vogue in the late 'eighties, and the picture of two "chappies" at Monte Carlo in what is presumably the height of the fashion presents them in check tweeds, spats and Austrian _jäger_ hats. The Homburg hat belongs to a slightly later period.

Mr. A. C. Corbould, in an illustration of the correct costume for Rotten Row in 1885 and 1889, shows that for men the tall hat and frock coat had yielded in the latter year to the bowler and tweeds. The dress of the ladies shows less change, but the tall hat has gone and the skirts are grey not black. Short tailless coats for morning wear were coming in, and _Punch_ welcomes in 1889 the introduction of brown boots as a relief from "that dual despotism, dreadful grown, of needless nigritude and futile polish." Whiskers were still worn, but, amongst young men, were severely restricted in length, and shorn of the ambrosial exuberance of the 'fifties and 'sixties.

"Æsthetes" were once described as a set of long-haired men and short-haired women, and Du Maurier's pictures justify the summary, but these peculiarities were confined to a coterie; they never seriously affected the usages of Mayfair or involved any revision of the "petty decalogue of Mode." Spats were generally worn, and the "mashers" of the 'eighties carried very slim umbrellas when they took their walks abroad in the park for Sunday parade. Evening dress presents few and negligible differences from that in vogue to-day. One of the very few references to military uniforms in these years indicates the reaction against "useless flummery." A military correspondent in _The Times_ had said, in 1890, that the day of cocked hats and plumes was gone, and _Punch_ availed himself of the saying to design a new and rational uniform for general officers, so that they might be mistaken by the enemy for harmless gentlemen farmers.

LETTERS AND JOURNALISM: DRAMA AND MUSIC

As I ventured to remark in an earlier volume, a literary critic's acumen and _flair_ are better shown in his estimates of writers whose fame is as yet unassured, or who are just emerging above the horizon, than of authors of established reputation. No special credit attaches to _Punch_ for writing with reverence of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Scott or Charles Lamb, whose centenary evoked a charming tribute in 1875, when the Headmaster of Christ's Hospital appealed in _The Times_ for support in erecting a memorial to Elia in his old school. A better test is furnished in his references to Browning and Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, Charles Reade and Trollope, Jefferies and Stevenson and Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward, and, to come down to the end of this period, Kipling and Barrie. Yet all established reputations were not respected by _Punch_. When Rabelais was included in Professor Henry Morley's series of World's Classics in 1883 _Punch_ uttered a vehement protest against the choice. He calls Rabelais a "dirty-minded, scurrilous, blasphemous, witty, broadly humorous and extravagantly grotesque clerical buffoon." The _Saturday Review_ thought otherwise, but _Punch_ declared that the defence was only put forward as "a stalking-horse for a malicious attack on ourselves."

The lines on George Eliot in 1881 are brief but laudatory. The phrase declining to rank her "among the tricksy mimes" is not happy; but she is spoken of as "this large-orbed glory of our times," and _Punch_ prophesies for her "unfading bays," a prophecy to which the present generation would seem inclined to demur. _Punch_ had little to add to his previous tributes to Carlyle when the Sage of Chelsea passed away in the same year, except to express the view that he was profoundly discontented with the England of to-day:--

He lived through England's triumph, but he heard With dying ears the shadow of decline.

[Sidenote: _Relations with American Authors_]

The founding of the Browning Society in the same year met with no more encouragement from _Punch_ than Miss Braddon's boiled-down versions of Scott's novels. _Punch_ dimly recognized Browning's greatness while resenting his obscurities and eccentricities, and in a further skit on the Society carefully disclaims any disrespect for Browning himself. This mitigated appreciation is developed in the memorial verses in 1889 which hail him as a gallant and manly singer and apostle of healthy optimism, while denying his Muse the quality of elegance. _Punch_ was nearer the mark in his laconic reference to Tupper, who died in the same year:--

"HIS NAME HAS PASSED INTO A PROVERB."

Martin F. Tupper, famed for his _Proverbial Philosophy_, has joined the majority. He was thoroughly in earnest, and said many a true thing in what popularly passed for poetry. He will be remembered as "The Great Maxim Gun" of the nineteenth century.

The _Annual Register_ reminds us that in twenty-five years over 100,000 copies of _Proverbial Philosophy_ were sold in England and nearly half a million in America.

_Punch_ was happier in dealing with Longfellow than with Emerson; the description of the latter as "the cheery oracle, alert and quick," is hardly adequate. _Punch_, however, protested against the proposed monument to Longfellow in the Abbey. He had learned to appreciate J. R. Lowell, who, on leaving England in 1885 after his four years' tenure of office as American Minister, said that "he had come among them as a far-away cousin, and they were sending him away as something very like a brother." _Punch_ refused to say good-bye to this great and wise American, and his "au revoir" verses contain pleasant allusions to _The Biglow Papers_ and _Study Windows_. Nor was his welcome of Oliver Wendell Holmes a whit less cordial, when the beloved "Autocrat" visited England to receive a D.C.L. degree in 1886. Bret Harte had been welcomed by _Punch_ in 1879 as a master of wit and wisdom, humour and pathos. Though, as was said of a famous composer, he began as a genius and ended as a talent, the influence of _The Luck of Roaring Camp_[10] on the development of the short story was fruitful and abiding. To complete the record of _Punch's_ relations with American authors it may be noted that in 1881 he greeted Joel Chandler Harris, the author of _Uncle Remus_, as a benefactor; that he resented Mr. W. D. Howells's critical depreciations of Dickens and Thackeray; and that, when Walt Whitman died in 1892, he indited what was virtually a palinode:--

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

[Footnote 10: It was translated in the feuilleton of an Italian paper as _La Fortuna del Campo Clamoroso_!]

To return to native writers, _Punch_ happily linked a great Churchman and a great Victorian novelist in the stanza which appeared at the close of 1882:--

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

_Punch_ had long acclaimed Tennyson as one of the major poets; but a slight element of reserve mingles in the congratulations on his peerage in 1883. Approval is tempered by chaff, and allusion is made to the Laureate's being prevented from taking his seat in the Lords by having lost his robes. There are no reserves in the tribute to the "beloved Cambridge rhymer" C. S. Calverley, when he passed away in early middle age in 1884. The memorial verses omit all mention of Calverley's genius for high parody, and incorrectly speak of the Ode to Beer as being written in Spenserian stanzas, but are otherwise affectionately appreciative:--

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

[Footnote 11: The surname borne by C. S. C. until his branch of the family resumed that of Calverley.]

[Sidenote: _Literary Controversies_]

Charles Reade, who died in the same year, is not ineptly described as the "Rupert of Letters," and his indiscretions and exuberances are overlooked in virtue of his services both as a dramatist and novelist, and the "noble rage" with which he vindicated "the master-virtue, Justice."

Echoes of a controversy over the censorship exerted by the libraries, revived periodically in later years, come to us from the years 1884 and 1885, when the banning of Mr. George Moore's novels led to a correspondence in the _Pall Mall Gazette_. Here the late Mr. George Gissing, while professing little sympathy with Mr. Moore, had fallen foul of Thackeray for truckling to the demands of Mrs. Grundy and betraying his artistic conscience--_à propos_ of the Preface to _Pendennis_. This was altogether too much for _Punch_, who belaboured Mr. Gissing to his heart's content in his most truculent vein, and did not abstain from his old and ugly habit of making offensive capital out of an antagonist's name: "humbly we own that we never heard of his name before, though it seems suggestive of a kind of guttural German embrace performed by the nationalizer of the Land [Henry George]."

Another famous literary quarrel broke out in 1886, the year of the trenchant attack, recalling the style and temper of Macaulay, on Mr. Gosse in the _Quarterly Review_ for October. As _Punch_ had already indulged in a good deal of acid pleasantry at the expense of the mutual admiration of "Poet Dobson" and "Poet Gosse," it was easy to guess on which side his sympathies would be enlisted. The sting of the _Quarterly's_ indictment lay in the statement that "the men who write bad books are the men who criticize them," and _Punch_ did not refrain from rubbing in the charge:--

Quarterly pay was dear to man Since or ever the world began, Chances vanish, and ventures cross, Even sometimes for bards like Gosse; Since or ever the world began. Quarterly pay was dear to man.

But there's a something in quarterly pay Which doesn't please all men alway! Less than half-truth is a _quarter-lie_, Bound to be found out by-and-by; Since or ever the world began, Quarterly pay has been strict with man. Play straight and honest--for, if you don't, The public meed 'tis receive you won't; The mutual arts of puff and praise, Even in these degenerate days, Sink at last in the scorn they raise; Since or ever the world began, Quarterly pay has been straight with man.

* * * * *

Poet Dobson shall claim on high From Poet Gosse immortality! And Poet Dobson shall shed the same, No doubt, upon Poet Gosse's name-- While a weak world wonders whence they came, And never a weakling dares deny (For there's no such thing as puffery) To each his immortality! Yet Quarterlies dare to say, for once, That dunce's works are reviewed by dunce.

Shocking! Anonymous donkeys speak Donkey's dislike of a cultured clique-- ("Fudge," by Goldsmith; but now called "cheek")-- Yet since or ever the world began, Quarterly reckoning's good for man!

The _Quarterly_, not for the first time, overshot the mark by its "savage and tartarly" methods, and the incriminated critic survived an attack fortified by accurate learning but impaired by unrestrained animosity.

[Sidenote: _Punch Salutes Mr. Kipling_]

_Punch_ resumed his genial strain in his tribute to Richard Jefferies, when that admirable prose poet of rural England and the pageantry of the seasons died prematurely in 1887. Matthew Arnold was not exactly one of _Punch's_ literary heroes. His urbanity was admitted, but _Punch_ slightly resented his intellectual superciliousness. Yet the verses on his death in 1888, cast in the "Thyrsis" stanza, acknowledge the value of his crusade against Philistinism, and the beauty of his elegiac poetry; he was "the great son of a good father." Towards Matthew Arnold's distinguished niece, Mrs. Humphry Ward, _Punch_ was less benevolent on the occasion of the appearance of _Robert Elsmere_ in the same year. The sorely tried hero is described as "wandering about, a married Hamlet in clerical attire, undecided as to his mission to set everything right and dying a victim to the Mephistophelean-Betsy-Prig spirit." Nor was _Punch_ altogether appreciative of R. L. Stevenson, though he pays a reluctant homage to his genius in one of the "Mems for the New Year" for a literary man in January, 1889: "Resolutely to avoid making the most distant reference to 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.'" The standard of precision in the editing of _Punch_ at this time was not above reproach. In the same year "Mr. J. L. Stevenson's _Master of Ballantine_" is reviewed though there was no such author and no such book. _Punch_ made amends, however, in 1890 in his salutations of two notable newcomers. In February he was delighted by "the homely simplicity," the keen observation, shrewd wit and gentle pathos of Barrie in _A Window in Thrums_. Six weeks later he recognized in Rudyard Kipling's _Plain Tales from the Hills_ a "new and piquant flavour," as of an Anglo-Indian Bret Harte. _Punch_ found an "excessive abundance of phrases and local allusions which will be dark sayings to the uninitiated." But here adverse criticism ends. For the rest he acknowledges in the new writer a surprising knowledge of life, civil, military and native, and a happy command of pathos and humour. This tribute was followed up a few weeks later by a much more characteristic act of homage in doggerel verse:--

TO THE NEW SCRIBE AND POET

Air:--"_O Ruddier than the Cherry._"

O Rudyard, in this sherry, I drink your very, very Good health. I would That write I could Like Kipling, sad or merry.

(Signed) INVIDIUS NASO.

The literary quality of _Punch's_ literary criticism was not high in these days and his outlook was decidedly limited. It is therefore a welcome surprise to find him not only recognizing the beauty of Cory's _Ionica_ in 1891, but specially singling out the famous version of the epitaph on Heraclitus. _Punch_ could not dissect it as Walter Headlam did afterwards, but he noted one blemish--the confusion of "thou" and "you." Almost as unexpected, in view of his attitude towards much contemporary realism, is _Punch's_ eulogy of Hardy's _Tess_ in 1892. Barring the "absurdly melodramatic character of the villain" _Punch_ has nothing but praise for its essential truth; acquits the author of "foolhardiness" in "boldly telling ugly truths about the Pagan Phyllises and Corydons of our dear old Christian England," and accepts his word for the faithfulness of the portraiture.

_Punch_ had rejoiced over the dissolution of the Browning Society formed by Dr. Furnivall in 1891:--

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

He was not, however, any better disposed to Swinburne, Furnivall's antagonist and rival in the art of ferocious obloquy, of whom he wrote in the same year:--

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

[Sidenote: _Parodies and "Limericks"_]

Of _Punch's_ relations with Ruskin we speak in another place. The most detailed notice of Meredith grew out of a real incident, the calling of the illustrious novelist as a witness in a libel action in the year 1891. _Punch_ professes to give a full report of his evidence, in which Judge and Counsel are overwhelmed in a deluge of Meredithyrambics. It is a perfectly friendly and by no means inexpert parody of the contortions and obscurities which induced Tennyson to declare that reading Meredith was like wading through glue. _Punch's_ friendly irreverence to his old friend of thirty years' standing prompts me to add that, throughout this period, parody was continually and increasingly employed, not like the bladder with which the Fool belabours bystanders, but as a weapon of genuine criticism. Here is a list, though not a complete list, of the authors who were subjected to this method in the period under review. Rhoda Broughton (for her emotional sentimentality) in _Gone Wrong_; Captain Hawley Smart, the sporting novelist; "Ouida"; Trollope; Disraeli, the florid magnificence and aristocratic atmosphere of whose _Endymion_ is amusingly travestied in 1880; J. C. Harris, the author of _Uncle Remus_; Rider Haggard; Lord Lytton ("Owen Meredith") in "Fitzdotterel," a parody of Glenaveril; Stevenson; F. C. Philips, the author of _As in a Looking Glass_; Oscar Wilde; Barrie; Kipling; Hardy; Henley and Maeterlinck (in the style of Ollendorff).

Burnand was not a parodist of the class of Calverley or Sir Owen Seaman, Max Beerbohm or Mr. J. C. Squire; but what he lacked in literary felicity and scholarship and in that impersonation which assumes the habit of mind of the author travestied, he made up in his unfailing sense of the ludicrous, his high spirits and audacious burlesque. He confined himself mainly to prose. At the end of this period Mr. Anstey was a veritable tower of strength to the paper. His _Voces Populi_ and his burlesques of recitations and music-hall songs are masterpieces of close observation and high-spirited fun. The extravagances of the æsthetic poets engaged other pens, but the best literary parodies belong to a rather later date. There is, however, a good specimen in the "domestic threnody" on Oleo-Margarine in the manner of Swinburne, which appears in 1881, and opens impressively:--

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

In this context I may note an original contribution to existing forms of verse in the ingenious doggerel French "Limericks" of Du Maurier, of which two specimens may suffice:--

_Il était un homme de Madère Qui cassa le nez à son père. On demandait "Pourquoi?" Il répondit "Ma foi! Vous n'avez pas connu mon père!"_

_Il existe une Espinstère à Tours, Un peu vite, et qui porte toujours Un ulsteur peau-de-phoque, Un chapeau bilicoque, Et des nîcrebocqueurs en velours._

[Sidenote: _Russel and Delane_]

Turning for the moment from gay to grave, we may note that _Punch_ bestowed his benediction on the _Dictionary of National Biography_, when the first instalment of what was the greatest act of true sportsmanship in the publishing world of our times appeared in January, 1885. _Per contra_, the proposal for a British Academy in 1890 only met with irreverent suggestions from _Punch_ for the constitution of the Elective Body.

_Punch_ kept a watchful eye on the developments of journalism and periodical literature. He notes in 1876 the impending appearance of _Truth_, but his opinion of Society journals, discussed elsewhere, was not flattering. When Alexander Russel, the great editor of the _Scotsman_, died in July, 1876, _Punch_ did not fail to recognize the conspicuous services of that fearless, honest and trenchant publicist and _malleus stultorum_:--

The shadows that make up our night, Were growing thin for him to fight, But still he fights, we think with pride, Our battle from the other side!

* * * * *

Long in our mêlée will be missed The mace of Russel's mighty fist, That struck and, wasting nought in sound, Buried its blow without rebound.

Bagehot, equally distinguished in letters and journalism, passed unnoticed in 1877, but Delane, the third and most widely renowned of the three great editors who died in the last half of this decade, was fitly eulogized in 1879 by one who was not the only writer who had served on the staff of both _Punch_ and _The Times_:--

Rest in thy grave, that knew no resting here, Editor without equal, strenuous soul, Staunch friend, despising favour, scorning fear, Far-seeing, forward, cleaving to thy goal.

He left a different scene from that he found, And had a large part in all change he saw, No slave, nor leader, of his time, but bound Abreast of it to keep its glass from flaw.

The centenary of _The Times_, which occurred in 1888, is duly noted, and by way of contrast to what was then a national institution there are allusions to short-lived but now forgotten papers and periodicals, more notorious than notable. _Punch_ kept a vigilant eye on the provincial press, but he was, on the whole, more inclined to utilize it when it suited its purpose and to make humorous capital out of its shortcomings than to acknowledge its solid merits. Of _Punch's_ own domestic history it may suffice to maintain that a mountain in the Arctic regions was named after him by the expedition under Captain Nares in 1876; and that he was once more banned in Paris on account of the cartoons on Marshal MacMahon in 1878. He paid affectionate homage to Tom Taylor on his death in 1880 as a cultivated man of letters, a considerate and judicious editor, above all, a warm-hearted, upright man and a staunch and loyal friend. Henry Mayhew, who died in 1887, "comrade of _Punch_ and champion of the poor," was only associated with the paper in its earlier days and for a short period. By the death of the gentle Percival Leigh, of "Pips's Diary" fame, in 1889, the last link was snapped with the days of Mark Lemon, Douglas Jerrold, Leech and Doyle and Thackeray.

FINE ARTS

A survey of the Fine Arts from 1874 to 1892, based on a study of _Punch_, reveals changes and even reactions in his outlook. As we have seen in an earlier volume, he had been converted in great measure to Pre-Raphaelitism; he had welcomed Whistler as a master etcher; he had been a severe and at times even savage critic of the stereotyped conventions, the opportunism, the inanities of the Royal Academy.

[Sidenote: _Punch and Æstheticism_]

Something of this spirit remains in the period under review. The annual exhibitions at Burlington House are dealt with in no reverential mood. As far back as 1877 we note the first appearance of an article with illustrations very much on the lines of the modern "Academy Depressions." The pictures exhibited in the years of his declining powers by the late Mr. J. R. Herbert, R.A., are caricatured without mercy in 1885, and the New English Art Club is welcomed in 1889 for its revolt against "the dull dead level of sleek respectability, the commonplace churchwardenism of suburban gentility." The sequel invites quotation:--

A bold, original, impudent lot are these New Englanders, but they are notwithstanding wonderfully refreshing. Sometimes their spirits are too much for their strength, and they come tremendous "croppers." It has been well said that a strikingly original writer occasionally writes absolute nonsense, and by the same rule an artist, who turns aside from the well-swept, carefully watered, mathematically paved academic high road, must not infrequently paint absolute nonsense; but he thinks for himself, he does not view Nature through the spectacles of others, and in nine cases out of ten he is likely to produce works that will be successful in the long run. Though there are some pictures among the collection will make the casual visitor jump, there are not a few will make him think.

Some of the rebels of 1889 have developed into the academics of thirty years later, and _Punch's_ list of the most notable contributors makes us jump as well as think: John S. Sargent, Solomon J. Solomon, Whistler, B. Sickert, Tuke, Edward Stott, A. Roche, N. Garstin, G. Roussell, Sidney Starr, F. Brown, A. Mann, H. Vos, W. J. Laidlaw and J. E. Christie.

_Punch_, then, cannot be written down as a Philistine, but there is no denying the fact that his artistic judgment was warped and impaired by his invincible hostility to the æsthetic movement; his inability to disentangle the good in it from the evil; his confusion of charlatanry and sincerity; and his failure to recognize the great services rendered by Morris in the domain of decorative design. Prejudice and ignorance mingle with good sense and good feeling in the manifesto which _Punch_ put forth in 1882, and which may serve as a general exposition of his artistic and literary creed in the 'eighties:--

IN EARNEST

Let us be clearly understood. The word "Æstheticism" has been perverted from its original meaning; i.e. the perception of all that is good, pure and beautiful in Nature and in Art, and, as now vulgarly applied, it has come in a slang sort of way to stand for an effeminate, invertebrate, sensuous, sentimentally-Christian, but thoroughly Pagan taste in literature and art, which delights in the idea of the resuscitation of the Great God Pan, in Swinburnian songs at their highest fever-pitch, in the mystic ravings of a Blake, the affectation of a Rossetti, the _Charmides_ and revoltingly pantheistic _Rosa Mystica_ of Oscar Wilde, the Songs of Passion and Pain and other similar mock-hysterical imitations of the "Mighty Masters." Victor Hugo, Ouida, Swinburne, Burne-Jones, have much to answer for.

This Æstheticism, as it has gradually come to be known, is the reaction from Kingsley's muscular Christianity. Exaggerated muscular Christianity, in its crusade against canting and whining religion, in its bold attempt to show that the practice of true religion was for men, as well as for women, trampled on the Christian Lily, emblem of perfect purity; and what Athleticism trod under foot, Æstheticism picked up, cherished, and then, taking the sign for the reality, paid to it the extravagant honours of a Pagan devotion; and the worship of the Lily was substituted for the veneration paid to the sacred character, in whose hand Christian Art had originally placed it. To this was added the worship of the Peacock's Feather. It is this false Æstheticism which we have persistently attacked, and will persistently attack to the bitter end, and henceforward those who misunderstand us do so wilfully, and it may be maliciously.

[Sidenote: _Whistler and Ruskin_]

_Punch_ was justified in deploring the opportunism of Millais in painting "pot-boilers" and "pretty-pretty" pictures, such as "Bubbles." He had powerful and well-equipped allies in his view that Whistler in his later manner left off painting or etching where the difficulties began, a view expressed in the lines in 1883 on "Whistler in Venice":--

Whistler is "Niminy-Piminy," Funny, fantastic, and quaint. Yet he's so clever that Jimmy nigh Makes men believe he can paint.

What of his works? Why, each etching is Only at present half done, And on the copper the sketching is Simply a wild piece of fun.

Vainly the Critics will sit on him, Why such a butterfly slay? No one can e'er put the bit on him-- Whistler's the wag of the day.

Yet _Punch_ thought Ruskin had gone too far in the famous onslaught which led to the historic lawsuit and verdict in 1878:--

To John Ruskin

(On a recent Verdict)

If "_Fors Clavigera_," dear Slade Professor, Means "Force that bears a club," Be warned, since of a big stick you're possessor, And more discreetly drub. Strength unrestrained's not greater strength but lesser, And scorn provoketh snub.

The Grosvenor Gallery, opened in 1877, at once eclipsed Burlington House as the favourite target of _Punch's_ ridicule and caricature, and as the home of all the tendencies which he repudiated in the manifesto quoted above. His general attitude is very much that of Gilbert in _Patience_; and Burne-Jones and Rossetti (whom he miscalls "D. S. Rosetti" as late as 1880) were indiscriminately confounded in dispraise along with the lesser fry. Tennyson's "Palace of Art" is perverted into a vehicle for assailing Pre-Raphaelitism. The "Dream of Queer Women" in 1878 gives prominence to the artistic type, and a visit to the Grosvenor Gallery in the early summer of the same year inspires "The Haunted Limbo; a May-night Vision" animated by the same hostility:--

Those women, ah, those women! They were white, Blue, green, and grey--all hues, save those of nature, Bony of frame, and dim, and dull of sight, And parlous tall of stature.

_Ars longa est_--aye, very long indeed, And long as Art were all these High-Art ladies, And wan and weird; one might suppose the breed A cross 'twixt earth and Hades.

If poor Persephone to the Dark King Had children borne, after that rape from Enna, Much so might they have looked, when suffering From too much salts and senna.

Many their guises, but no various grace Or changeful charm relieved their sombre sameness Of form contorted, and cadaverous face, And limp lopsided lameness.

[Sidenote: _Homage to Cruikshank_]

Leighton's "Athlete and Python" in 1877 had been saluted as "a statue at last," and _Punch_ welcomed his election as P.R.A. in the following year, with an excellent portrait by Sambourne of "the right man in the right place." It was in 1878 again that _Punch_ turned aside from the flagellation of his pet aversions to pay homage to the genius of George Cruikshank, who died on February 1:--

England is the poorer by what she can ill spare--a man of genius. Good, kind, genial, honest and enthusiastic George Cruikshank, whose frame appeared to have lost so little of its wiry strength and activity, whose brain seemed as full of fire and vitality at fourscore as at forty, has passed away quietly and painlessly after a few days' struggle. He never worked for _Punch_, but he always worked with him, putting his unresting brain, his skill--in some forms of Art unrivalled--and his ever productive fancy, at the service of humanity and progress, good works, and good will to man. His object, like our own, was always to enforce truth and urge on improvement by the powerful forces of fun and humour, clothed in forms sometimes fanciful, sometimes grotesque, but never sullied by a foul thought, and ever dignified by a wholesome purpose.

His fourscore and six years of life have been years of unintermitting labour, that was yet, always, labour of love. There never was a purer, simpler, more straightforward, or altogether more blameless man. His nature had something childlike in its transparency. You saw through him completely. There was neither wish nor effort to disguise his self-complacency, his high appreciation of himself, his delight in the appreciation of others, any more than there was to make himself out better, or cleverer, or more unselfish than his neighbours.

In him England has lost one who was, in every sense, as true a man as he was a rare and original genius, and a pioneer in the arts of illustration.

_Punch's_ estimate accords with that of the friend who knew Cruikshank well and described him as "in every word and deed a God-fearing, Queen-honouring, truth-loving, honest man," and it is all the more significant in view of Cruikshank's vehement and even fanatical espousal of the cause of temperance. Another great illustrator, though of a very different type, emerged in the following year in Randolph Caldecott. His genial and graceful commentaries on Nursery Rhymes were entirely after _Punch's_ heart. He was speedily enlisted as an occasional contributor up to 1886, the year of his premature death, when _Punch_ faithfully summed up the gifts of a true benefactor of all ages:--

We loved the limner whose gay fun Was ever loyal to the Graces; Who mixed the mirth of _Gilpin's_ run With willowy forms and winsome faces; Who made old nursery lyrics live With frolic force rejuvenated, And yet the sweetest girls could give That ever pencil-point created.

From _Bracebridge Hall_ to _Banbury Cross_ His fancy flew with fine facility. Orchards all apple-bloom and moss, Child sport, bucolical senility, The field full cry, snug fireside ease, Horse-fun, dog-joke his pencil covers, With Alderman and hawthorn trees, Parsons and Squires, and rustic lovers.

But in these years _Punch_ had little time to spare for praise; he was so busy belabouring Burne-Jones and Rossetti, the Grosvenor Gallery, the Kyrle Society, or new fashions in house decorations and furniture, in which he saw nothing but gloom and discomfort. The protest in 1879 of the three Slade Professors--Sidney Colvin, W. B. Richmond and Legros--against the critics who denied Burne-Jones genius and greatness on the strength of defective anatomical details, left _Punch_ impenitent. He mocked at their "triune testimonial" as an unconvincing attempt to convert the callous and captious critics who,

Persisted in belabouring B.-J. with tongue and pen Whilst Philistia looked on and laughed at those Three Mighty Men.

[Sidenote: _Prigs and Philistines_]

It is true that _Punch_ makes some reservations in his "Moral":--

Critics are full of "cussedness," omniscience sometimes slips, And even triune Oracles may chance to miss their tips.

But his sympathies undoubtedly remain with the critics, and he virtually identifies himself with Philistia in the plea of the Philistine in the following year:--

Take away all your adornments æsthetical, Plates of blue china and bits of sage green, Though you may call me a monster heretical, I can't consider them fit to be seen. Etchings and paintings I loathe and abominate, Grimly I smile at the name of Burne-Jones, Hating his pictures where big chins predominate-- Over lean figures with angular bones.

Buy me what grinning stage rustics call "farniture," Such as was used by our fathers of old; Take away all your nonsensical garniture, Tapestry curtains and borders of gold, Give me the ancient and solid mahogany, Mine be the board that will need no repairs, Don't let me see, as I sit at my grog, any Chippendale tables or spindle-legged chairs.

Hang up a vivid vermilion wall-paper, Covered with roses of gorgeous hue, Matching a varnished and beautiful hall-paper, Looking like marble so polished and new. Carpets should all show a floral variety, Wreaths intermingling of yellow and red; So, when it enters my home, will Society Say, here's a house whence æsthetics have fled.

[Sidenote: _Belabouring Burne-Jones_]

The "Lay of the Private View" at the Grosvenor Gallery in May, 1881, forms a useful supplement to Gilbert and Sullivan's _Patience_, produced a fortnight before the verses appeared:--

The Grosvenor! the view that's called private, Yet all the world seems to be there; Each carriage that comes to arrive at The door, makes the populace stare. There's Gladstone, severe of demeanour, It's plain that the pictures don't please; And there, with an aspect serener, Her Highness the Princess Louise.

The Haunt of the very æsthetic, Here come the supremely intense, The long-haired and hyper-poetic Whose sound is mistaken for sense. And many a maiden will mutter, When Oscar looms large on her sight, "He's quite too consummately utter, As well as too utterly quite."

* * * * *

Here's Whistler paints Miss Alexander, A portrait washed out as by rain; 'Twill raise Ruskin's critical dander, To find James is at it again. The flesh-tints of Watts are quite comic; There's Herkomer's chaos of stones; But where is the great anatomic Improver on Nature, Burne-Jones?

A Grosvenor without him so strange is, We miss the long chins and knock-knees, The angel of bronze, who for change is Tied up to the stiffest of trees: Limp lads with their _belli capelli_, Mad maidens with love smitten sore, Oh, shade of defunct Botticelli, Burne-Jones comes to startle no more!

I deal in another section with the fashionable cult of æstheticism, which was now at its zenith. In estimating its artistic importance, _Punch_ erred in his refusal to discriminate between eccentricity and independence. He continued to "belabour B.-J.," and brackets him with Whistler in the ribald suggestion that they were jointly responsible for the pictures exhibited by the "Screevers" or pavement artists. Millais is congratulated on breaking away from Pre-Raphaelitism, and invidious comparisons are drawn in 1886 between his pictures and those of Holman Hunt:--

There couldn't be a better foil to the manliness of the Millais Show at the Grosvenor than the pseudo-mediæval-O-quite-too-beautiful-namby -pamby-gilt-edged-and-gothic-clasped-Church-service style of the effeminate religious Art of Mr. Holman Hunt. Millais tried it, and, after a struggle, snapped the Pre-Raphaelite fetters, and escaped.

Yet in the next two years Millais is criticized for sacrificing character to "prettiness" and desecrating his talent by placing it at the disposal of the advertiser. Watts's enigmatic "Hope" was "guyed" in 1887 under the title "Cutting off her head with a saw." The multifarious activities of Herkomer--painter, etcher, director of a school of art at Bushey, designer of posters, operatic composer, etc.--did not escape _Punch's_ amused notice. _Punch_ himself, as might readily be expected, did not enjoy an immunity from art criticism. In 1883 he had congratulated Ruskin on his second election to the Slade Professorship at Oxford; at the end of the year Ruskin repaid the compliment, in his lectures on the Art of England, by a long detailed and in the main highly eulogistic survey of _Punch's_ artistic work. But the panegyric was tempered by certain reserves:--

Says Mr. Ruskin, having before him in review one or two selected specimens of _Mr. Punch's_ cartoons:--

"Look, too, at this characteristic type of British heroism--'John Bull guards his pudding.' Is this the final outcome of King Arthur and Saint George, of Britannia and the British Lion? And is it your pride or hope or pleasure that in this sacred island that has given her lion hearts to Eastern tombs and her Pilgrim Fathers to Western lands, that has wrapped the sea round her as a mantle, and breathed against her strong bosom the air of every wind, the children born to her in these latter days should have no loftier legend to write upon their shields than 'John Bull guards his Pudding'?"

And then Mr. Ruskin, as if conscious that the very onward sweep of his own free fancy has carried him beyond the limits of fair and reasonable estimate, as it were, harks somewhat back again, and offering _Mr. Punch_ something in the nature of an apology, acquits him of all true responsibility for this same terrible and offending "pudding":--

"It is our fault" (proceeds Mr. Ruskin) "and not the Artist's; and I have often wondered what Mr. Tenniel might have done for us if London had been as Venice, or Florence, or Siena. In my first course of Lectures I called your attention to the Picture of the Doge Mocenigo kneeling in prayer; and it is our fault more than Mr. Tenniel's if he is forced to represent the heads of the Government dining at Greenwich rather than worshipping at St. Paul's."

[Sidenote: _Punch's Virtues as an Art Critic_]

_Punch_ took the criticism in good part, while declaring that he had found this commonplace nineteenth century and its humdrum materials pretty well suited to his purpose; and after indulging in a whimsical dialogue between the editor, Giovanni Tennielo, and Ruskino in Venice, comes to the conclusion that after all the Queen of the Adriatic may have had even in her great days something less noble to lose than that condemned typical "pudding" which John Bull as yet has fortunately known how to guard. In this context I may add that in 1885 _Punch_ reprinted an advertisement in which a young man, seeking for a place, stated amongst his credentials that he could "paint and talk Ruskinesque."

As I have not minimized _Punch's_ limitations as an art critic, it is only fair to add that he was often sound and sometimes even acute. He said the right thing on the _parvenu_ as art patron, and delicately hinted his approval of the independence of portrait painters. His appreciation of the strength of "Phiz" (Hablot K. Browne) as the illustrator of Dickens and Lever in helping us to visualize and fix certain types is excellently done, and generous admiration does not prevent him pointing out "Phiz's" weaknesses--his sketchiness, thin and skimpy style, and simpering mannerisms. This was said on the occasion of the show of "Phiz's" drawings in 1883 (the year after his death) which _Punch_ recommended to "genial Middle-age with memories and unpriggish Youth without hyperæsthetic prejudices."

Nothing could be better in its way, again, than the castigation of the "slick" and deliberate eccentricities of Jan Van Beers in 1886. _Punch_ admits the Dutch artist's talent, his capacity for higher work, proved in historical paintings, and then sets to work to wield the lash:--

Popinjay Art is plentiful enough. It is the trick whereby mediocrity antics itself into a sort of notoriety, and cynical cleverness indolently plays the fool with an easily humbugged public. It is probably calculated--perhaps with some reason--that these stagey tricks, and limelight effects, and dismal draperies, and bogey surprises, and peep-show horrors will perplex people into a foolish wonder, if not into an impossible enjoyment or an honest approval. Maybe that is all which is aimed at? But what an aim for anything calling itself Art!

Posturing Pierrots and smirking skeletons, goggling sphinxes and giggling cocottes, cadaverous surprises and ensanguined startlers, all the parade of nightmare and nastiness, pall upon the mind, as the phantasmagoric effects and sickly scents do upon the senses, of the visitors to the Salon Parisien. Whim and fantasy are all very delightful in their way. But this is not Wonderland, it is the world of drunken delirium and the Witches' Sabbath. A girl with emerald face, purple hair, and vivid vermilion lips, peeping between amber portières, is an inoffensive though purposeless, and not very interesting bizarrerie. But such gratuitous ghastlinesses as "Will o' the Wisp," "_Felo de se_," "_Vive la Mort!_" and particularly the offensively named "_Ecce Homo_," are simply revolting horrors. Somebody has hazarded the statement that they are Edgar-Poe-ish. Pooh! Poe was creepy sometimes, but he was an artist, an idealist, subordinating even occasional horror to the beautiful in his daring dreams.

[Sidenote: _Impartial Satire_]

As a rôle _Punch_ was a strong partisan in art; yet on occasion he could hold the balance. I have illustrated the change in his view of Whistler, but it never degenerated into abuse. The dialogue, "Wrestling with Whistler," suggested by the exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in the spring of 1892, impartially satirizes Whistlerites, frank Philistines, and the literal and prosaic persons who were puzzled and bewildered by "arrangements," "harmonies," "symphonies" and "nocturnes." These simple souls, unable to recognize the objects depicted, were not helped by the faithful who retorted, "Ah, but it's the way he saw it!" To-day, as thirty years ago, their point of view is faithfully expressed in the unconscious irony of the serious elderly lady:

I've no patience with the man. Look at Gustave Doré now. I'm sure _he_ was a beautiful artist if you _like_. Did _he_ go and call his "Leaving the Prætorium" a "Symphony" or a "Harmony," or any nonsense of that kind? Of course not--and yet look at the _difference_!

It is true that the artist, like the prophet, is often "not without honour save in his own country and in his own house." The saying happily does not apply to _Punch_ and his contributors. When Richard Doyle died in 1883, more than thirty years had elapsed since he severed his connexion with the paper, but _Punch_ had never forgotten the old comrade who had designed his cover, and had been equally at home among the imps of Elfland and the swells and snobs of society:--

Turning o'er his own past pages, _Punch_, with tearful smile, can trace That fine talent's various stages, Caustic satire, gentle grace, Feats and freaks of Cockney funny-- Brown, and Jones, and Robinson; And, huge hive of Humour's honey, Quaint quintessence of rich fun, Coming fresh as June-breeze briary With old memories of our youth-- Thrice immortal Pips's Diary! Masterpiece of Mirth and Truth!

Personally I should invert the epithet "thrice immortal" and apply it to the "Continental Tour of Brown, Jones and Robinson"; otherwise the verses are a well merited tribute to the winged fancy and graceful humour of "Dicky Doyle." Charles Keene's death in January, 1891, removed another good comrade whose association with the paper was unbroken up to his last illness, and was one of the chief if not the greatest of its artistic glories:--

Frank, loyal, unobtrusive, simple-hearted, Loving his book, his pipe, his song, his friend, Peaceful he lived and peacefully departed, A gentle life-course, with a gracious end.

[Sidenote: _Ruskin on Leech_]

So much for the man; as for the artist, _Punch_ was hardly overstating the case when he claimed that the exhibition of Keene's work in the following May stood for the supreme triumph of black and white in the achievements of its greatest master.

Ruskin, in the lecture noted above, had described Leech's work as containing "the finest definition and natural history of the classes of our society, the kindest and subtlest analysis of its foibles, the tenderest flattery of its pretty and well-bred ways, with which the modesty of subservient genius ever immortalized or amused careless masters." Small wonder was it, then, that _Punch_ appealed for greater generosity to John Leech's three surviving sisters. Their combined pensions only amounted to £180--a "dole" which lent point to the dramatic dialogues in 1881 between a Minister and a Celebrity and (after the Celebrity's death) between the Minister and his Secretary, as a result of which the former decides to give the orphan daughter £50.

The cult of Japanese art in the late 'eighties furnished _Punch's_ artists with new formulas and new methods of treating Parliamentary scenes. It also inspired the following ingenious adaptation of a famous phrase:--

Madame Roland Re-Edited (from a sham Japanese point of view): O Liberty! what strange (decorative) things are done in thy name!

_Punch_ had reproached Millais for condescending to the "pretty-pretty" style, but in 1888 he was moved to caricature the modern fear of the same tendency--a fear destined to dominate so much of modern art in later years and to enthrone the Golliwog in the nursery.

DRAMA, OPERA AND MUSIC

_Punch_ was mixed up with the drama from the very beginning. He drew his name and his initial inspiration from a puppet-show; all four editors who held the office between 1841 and 1892 were playwrights--three of them, Mark Lemon, Tom Taylor and Burnand prolific playwrights--and many of his leading contributors from Douglas Jerrold onwards owed a double allegiance to journalism and the drama. In these circumstances one can hardly expect to find in _Punch's_ copious references to plays and players an entirely judicial or dispassionate critical attitude. Yet when all deductions have been made on the score of old loyalties, partisanship and even prejudice, his record, during the period which opened with the visits of Salvini and ended with Tree's Hamlet and the tyranny of "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," shows a creditable readiness to acclaim fresh talent and to applaud a good thing irrespective of its origin. We find a certain amount of resentment against the adulation of foreigners, but his patriotism in this respect is untainted by any Chauvinism--witness his "Salvo to Salvini" in 1875:--

_Punch_ is rejoiced to see that a representative body of the London Actors lately made express application to the great Italian Player, now displaying his art for London's behoof, to give a morning performance of _Othello_, at which they could be present. Salvini answered the application with an Italian's courtesy, and an artist's feeling with his fellows. Remembering how, when _Punch_ was young, an illiterate English mob once howled and hooted a French company from the stage of Drury Lane, and how, when the noblest Actor of his generation, William Macready, published a protest against the cowardly outrage, in which he associated his brother Actors with himself, a large body of those Actors disclaimed such association, and denied William Macready's right to speak for more than William Macready--_Punch_ cannot but rejoice in the present indication of a larger and less "parochial" spirit of appreciation.

The actors who had the good fortune to see Salvini on Monday have seen a great artist, in the ideal sense of the word--one whose art "in the very storm and whirlwind of his passion, can beget a temperance that gives it smoothness"; whose voice keeps its music even in rage or agony, and whose action can be graceful, even in its moments of utmost vehemence; and this without forfeiture of force, or sacrifice of truth. It is of secondary importance whether or not those who hear Salvini understand Italian. They are sure to know the text of _Othello_; and Salvini's look, tone, and gesture speak the universal language.

[Sidenote: _Salvini, Ristori, Bernhardt_]

They must have marked the breadth and calmness of his style, the self-restraint that never betrays effort, and the grandeur resulting from this element of large effect. They will have seen how superior to points and petty tricks and clap-traps he is from first to last; how completely the Moor, steeped at first in the stately Oriental calm that almost looks like languor, till love lights in his eye and mantles in his face, or doubt begins to torture, and sense of wrong gathers and glows to fury, and a rage, far more terrible and unsparing than a wild beast's, works to madness in his brain.

The over-vehemence of Othello's final agony is deprecated, but _Punch_ concludes by recommending all "who wish to know the highest expression of ideal tragic acting to see this famous Italian actor."

As he had welcomed another glory of Italian art in Ristori, so he yielded to the versatile enchantments of the "divine Sarah" in her frequent visits to our shores. The following tribute dates from 1879:--

TO SARAH!

(By an exuberant Enthusiast)

Mistress of Hearts and Arts, all met in you The Picturesque, informed by Soul of Passion! Say, dost thou feed on milk and honey-dew, Draining from goblets deep of classic fashion Champagne and nectar, shandy-gaff sublime, Dashed with a pungent smack of _eau-de-Marah_, Aspasia, Sappho, Circé of the time? Seductive Sarah!

"Muse"? All Mnemosyne's bright brood in one! Compound of Psyché, Phryné, Britomarté, Ruler of storm and calm, Euroclydon And Zephyr! Slender Syrian Astarté! With voice the soul of music, like that harp Which whilom sounded in the Hall of Tara. How dare Philistines at thy whimsies carp, Soul-swaying Sarah!!

"_Poseuse_"? Pooh! pooh! Yet who so well _can_ pose As thou, sweet statuesque slim sinuosity? "Stagey"? Absurd! "The death's-head and the rose"? Delicious! Gives the touch of tenebrosity That lifts thee to the Lamia level. Oh! Shame on the dolts who hint of Dulcamara, _A propos_ of _levée_ and picture-show, Serpentine Sarah!!!

* * * * *

O idol of the hour and of my heart! Who calls thee crazy, half, and half-capricious? A compound of _Lionne's_[12] and Barnum's part, In _outrecuidance_ rather injudicious? Ah! heed them not! Play, scribble, sculp, sing, paint, Pose as a Plastic-Proteus, _mia cara_; Sapphic, seraphic, quintessential, quaint, _Sémillante_ Sarah!!!!

[Footnote 12: Presumably a reference to Louis XIV's versatile Minister of that name.]

[Sidenote: _"Pierrot à Londres"_]

This is enthusiasm at high-water mark, though the note of irony is not absent. Admiration, appreciation, or criticism never lacking in friendliness mark the notices of other visitors from the Old or the New World--the Dutch actors from Rotterdam in 1879 whose performance in _Anne Mie_ impelled _Punch_ to rewrite Canning's dispatch:--

In matters dramatic the charms of the Dutch Are perfect _ensemble_ and sharpness of touch;

Turning to native drama, one cannot avoid noticing that _Punch_, who had followed Irving's career with interest and sympathy from its modest beginnings in farce and comedy, became increasingly critical of his later ventures. He is pronounced physically unsuited to the part of Macbeth in 1875, and _Punch_ did not fail to fasten on the vulnerable points in his Romeo in 1882. In the same year Irving is especially blamed for his resort to the "benefit" performance system, and his defence is pronounced unconvincing in an article ingeniously headed, "The Doubt of the Benefit," in which Irving is described as "an admirable Comedian, an occasionally impressive Tragedian, a nervously painstaking Actor, and, generally, an indifferent Elocutionist." But _Punch_ had indulged in even more caustic criticism of the popular actor-manager in the previous year, _à propos_ of an address delivered at Edinburgh:--

Again the sickening cry is raised about the "social status of the Actor," and this time _à propos_ of a paper read by Mr. Henry Irving, at a Philosophical Institution known as The Music Hall in Edinburgh. The social status of the Actor is that of a well-fed, well-clothed, well-paid--perhaps over-paid--worker in a curious profession. If he be amusing and intelligent, and behaves like a gentleman, he is exceptionally favoured by what is called "Society"; as most people, except a few fanatics, are interested in the world behind the footlights. But every Actor is not necessarily amusing, intelligent, and gentlemanly, and these are the people, probably, who are a little uneasy about their status. If they are not content with their pudding, the world is all before them. On the other hand, the more favoured ones are a little apt to be spoiled by injudicious patronage. "Society" is a little too ready to treat them like pet poodles.

Why on earth does Mr. Irving yearn for the companionship of Bishops? Does he want to convert them all to Irvingism, and to come and listen to him discoursing Shakespearean Inspirations in Unknown Tongues? Does he require Church Patronage for the Stage, and his Theatre Stalls filled as those of a Cathedral are with Prebends, Minor Canons and Greater Guns of the Ecclesiastical Establishment? Is it the height of an Actor's ambition to swell the crowd of distinguished Nobodies at the Duchess of Mountrouge's reception, or to appear as a great attraction of Lady Doubtful's Assemblies, and to be able to exhibit cards of fashionable "At Homes" in the mirror which is held up to Nature over his mantelpiece?

Elevation of the Stage forsooth! We should have thought that the Stage had elevated Mr. Irving above all such twaddle as this.

"Act well your part, there all the honour lies."

Be satisfied with this: Live for your Art, not for that limited, narrow, uncharitable, scandalmongering section of the great public which calls itself "Society," and which loves to patronize Art in any form at the least possible cost to itself.

Even harsher is the rebuke administered three weeks later to Irving for his self-laudatory speeches, and the unnecessary autobiographical reminiscences in which he contrasted his present with his past earnings, thus creating a false impression of one who was in reality the most generous of men. The petting of actors by society appealed to _Punch_ no more than the invasion of the stage by amateurs; he regarded such favouritism as ministering to their worst infirmity, vanity; and in 1884 he fell foul of Mrs. Kendal's speech at the Social Science Congress on the social position of actors, in which she reprobated self-advertisement (Satan rebuking Sin, according to her critic), but claimed a recognition which _Punch_ denounced as mere snobbishness. Of Ellen Terry, who was associated with Irving at the Lyceum from 1878, _Punch_ remained the affectionate and benevolent admirer, though he admitted that her conception of Lady Macbeth in 1889 raised a good deal of legitimate criticism. The lavish mounting of the Lyceum revivals, I may add, exercised _Punch's_ frugal mind, and reached a climax in the production of _Henry VIII_ in 1892.

[Sidenote: _Idols of the 'Eighties_]

_Punch_, as I have so often insisted, was a Londoner first and foremost, but he did not exclude the provinces from his survey. The opening of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon in 1879 was a landmark in the history of the legitimate drama, and _Punch_ did not fail to acknowledge the strenuous local labour and large local liberality which had carried to completion a worthy scheme for commemorating the most memorable work ever wrought by mortal brain. It was in the same year, again, that _Punch_ recorded with sympathy and admiration the memorial performances given at Manchester for the benefit of the widow and family of Charles Calvert, the actor-manager "who did more for the elevation and development of the higher drama, historical and imaginative, than any provincial manager on record, and than any metropolitan managers, except Macready, Charles Kean and Phelps." Phelps and Charles Mathews had both died in 1878, and Buckstone in 1879. Mrs. Langtry, who had taken to the stage, is advised to give up acting in 1882. In 1883 Mr. Anstey Guthrie's immortal _Vice Versâ_ was dramatized and produced with Mr. Charles Hawtrey as Mr. Bultitude. The evergreen veterans of to-day were already advancing in fame and popularity. Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson had appeared as Romeo in 1881. In 1884 the late Mr. Wilson Barrett, encouraged by his successes in melodrama, essayed the rôle of Hamlet. _Punch_ maliciously embodies his criticisms in a letter to Irving, then touring in America, but the general tenor of his remarks is decidedly reassuring to Irving. The long run of _Our Boys_ in 1877 was equalled and eclipsed, after an initial failure, by the prodigious popularity of _The Private Secretary_, also in 1884. Lady Bancroft died only the other day; Sir Squire is still hale and hearty. Yet it is thirty-six years ago since they resolved, while still at the zenith of their popularity and in early middle age, to quit the scenes of their many triumphs, and _Punch_, in his notice of their farewell performance, says no more than the strict truth:--

The Bancrofts have done much for the Stage; in fact, the _mise-en-scène_ at the houses where Comedy is played, owes its present completeness entirely to them. They, and Mr. Hare with them, introduced the natural style of acting, thereby supplanting the theatrical tone and gestures of the old school, which Burlesques had done good service in laughing off our Stage for ever.

The performance at Cambridge of the _Eumenides_ by "Messrs. Æschylus and Verrall" in the same year is handled in a vein of friendly facetiousness. _Punch_ found Sir Charles Stanford's music rather more than worthy of the occasion, but thinks Æschylus and his very clever collaborator might have shown more common sense and allowance for modern feeling.

_Punch_ was less considerate in his treatment of the performance of Shelley's _Cenci_ by the Shelley Society which had been founded by "a Dr. Furnivall," the scholar and redoubtable controversialist whom _Punch_ had already attacked in connexion with the Browning Society. The performance was described by a member of the society as four hours of monotonous horror:--

"The actors and actresses in the labour of love did all that could be done; but the play is proved to be impossible, and so let us leave it in the hope (shared by many of my fellow-members) that before another 'sixty years' it will be possible to debate the matter calmly, but _not_ to put '_The Cenci_' on the Stage."

_Punch_ was less hopeful. He regarded "the literary disease of which the Shelley Society may be regarded as an exemplar" as an ineradicable malady.

[Sidenote: _"L'Assommoir" in French and English_]

Sir Frank Benson's productions of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ and _The Taming of the Shrew_ in 1890 come in for more commendation of the scenic effects than the acting, but a favourable exception is made in favour of the late Stephen Phillips, afterwards better known as poet and dramatist. _Punch's_ notice of the late Sir Herbert Tree's Hamlet in the summer of 1892 is a good specimen of discreetly veiled disparagement. But it does not quite accord with Gilbert's famous description, "funny without being vulgar," as _Punch_ considered some of the new readings and by-play to be tasteless and grotesque. It was this production that gave rise to that "desperate saying" that to solve the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, all that was necessary was to let Tree play Hamlet and then open the two graves and see which of the mighty dead had turned.

It would be tedious to enumerate all the references to actors and plays, famous or forgotten, which crowd the pages of _Punch_ in this period; to quote them in full would be impossible. Toole was one of his favourites. Boucicault was not, and excites satirical comment for having written a letter to Disraeli in 1876, puffing his own play _The Shaughraun_. A little earlier The Great Vance--immortalized in Stevenson's _Wrong Box_--the "lion comique" of the music-halls, is rapped over the knuckles for advertising his performances as "patronized by the Prince and Princess of Wales." _Punch's_ notice of Zola's _L'Assommoir_ when he saw it in Paris in May, 1879, reflects a divided mind. He found it fascinating and intolerable. Gil-Naza's acting as Coupeau was "wonderful, fearful, admirable, awful, infernal." Yet "the moral to most of those who assisted, the other evening, at _L'Assommoir_ was, 'I say! Dash it! It's too horrible! Let's go and drink!' and the biggest drink I've had for a long time--much needed, I assure you--was after seeing _L'Assommoir_." _Punch_ doubts whether the play could ever be done in English, but it was produced at the Princess's Theatre only a few weeks later in Charles Reade's version, with Charles Warner as Coupeau. The notice in _Punch_ purports to be written by a working man, who signs himself "one as is a-thinking seriously of Taking the Pledge, but don't see his Way to it yet." He acknowledges the terrible realism of Warner's acting, but his testimonial is invalidated by the final sentences:--

Yes, Sir, _Drink_ is a moral drama if ever there was one. It ought to do a deal of good. And as I think it over, I feel as I want a little something just to take the taste on it out o' my mouth.

_Punch_ clearly did not believe in temperance propaganda on the stage. Nor did he support the restriction of child performers, maintaining in 1880 that the theatres at Christmas time were admirable infant schools; "even for teaching," he was "open to back the Theatre, while it lasts, against the Board School any day." There was much talk at this time about dramatic schools, but _Punch_ refused to take the movement seriously, preferring to give a burlesque list of lectures by well-known actresses on aspects of acting entirely foreign to their own styles. He joined in the protest against the abolition of the pit at the Haymarket and the general raising of prices in the same year; and Captain Shaw's Treatise on Fires in Theatres found in him an energetic supporter of reform in respect of structural and other safeguards. Laments over the degeneracy of pantomime and the decline of the red-hot poker business still occur, but honourable exception is invariably made on behalf of the famous Vokes family. He had at an early date described the Drury Lane pantomime as "_Vokes et præterea nihil_." _Bluebeard_, at Christmas, 1879, is called "Vokes's Entire." "The family is a necessity at Drury Lane"; and then _Punch_ goes on to embroider his text. Necessity has no Legs, but here the Vokes family have the pull over the Mother of Invention--alluding to the high-kicking exploits of Fred Vokes and other members of that engaging and high-spirited family. If pantomime showed signs of decay, the "sacred lamp of Burlesque" was burning brightly at the Gaiety with John Hollingshead as Lampadephoros and the famous quartet--Nellie Farren, Kate Vaughan, Edward Terry and Royce--as his chief hierophants. Miss Vaughan's secession in 1883, chronicled in a graceful tribute, rendered possible the historic question from the bench, "Who is Miss Connie Gilchrist?" but by 1892 she too had quitted the Gaiety to add histrionic lustre to the pages of Debrett. In 1883 Miss Vesta Tilley was playing in pantomime at Drury Lane; in 1884 Mrs. John Wood was singing "His Heart _was_ true to Poll"; in 1886 the inauguration of the O.U.D.S. at Oxford introduced Mr. Bourchier as Feste in _Twelfth Night_; in 1887 _Punch_ records the _début_ of Miss Violet Vanbrugh.

[Sidenote: _More Gibes at Ibsen_]

Ibsen's _Pillars of Society_, produced at a matinée in July, 1888, is compared by Punch with a melodrama performed at the "Old Vic" before it became "a sort of frisky Coffee Palace," very much to the disadvantage of Ibsen. In the old play the dialogue was crisp and to the point, in the new it was "hopelessly dull." _Punch_ adds that Mr. William Archer's translation seemed excellent, adding, "But what a pity he ever learned Norwegian!" Ada Rehan, the famous Irish-American actress, made her first appearance in London with Daly's company in the summer of 1890, but _Punch_, while delighted by her charming vivacity, thought she was already too old to play _ingénue_ parts. Her successes in Shakespearean comedy were to come later.

All these events and many others came under _Punch's_ notice, but it must be confessed that his shortcomings as a critic are nowhere so conspicuous as in the domain of music. It is true that in 1875 he expressed a guarded admiration for _Lohengrin_: he found it good in parts, like the curate's egg. "Though not melodious, it is certainly most musically interesting and abundantly poetical." But the report of his Bayreuth correspondent in 1876 is admittedly a bogus document, compiled from German phrase-books in London, and tells us nothing about the music, for the writer never went to Bayreuth. The Albert Hall Festival is treated much in the same spirit of entirely irresponsible burlesque. _Punch_ is determined at all costs to represent the Festival as a carnival of "Wagnerian waggeries." When it was over he admitted that many who went to scoff remained to praise. "The _Rhinegold_ is a masterpiece," but he, is careful to add "this is not a discovery of mine," and goes on to express his deliberate opinion that the Tetralogy must inevitably be vulgarized by representation on the stage. "Such a _mise-en-scène_ as the _Ring_ demands is impossible," and he turns with obvious relief to discuss Patti in _Dinorah_ and the performance of _Orphée aux Enfers_ at the Alhambra.

In 1882 _Punch_ attended the performances of the _Ring_, and after four nights "deliberately" said, "Never again with you, _Wotan, Siegfried & Co._" He found nothing new in the idea of leading motives: it was as old as the oldest pantomime. A few weeks later _Punch_ heard _Tristan_ done at Drury Lane and was bored to extinction:--

Had it been by a young English composer, or an elderly English composer of the Hanwellian School, it would not have been tolerated for half an hour after its commencement. For ourselves, if of two penances we had to choose one, either to sit out a long, dull sermon in a stuffy church on an August afternoon, or to hear one Act of _Tristan and Isolda_, we should unhesitatingly select the former, where, at all events, there would be the certainty of a tranquil repose, from which no cruel drum, bassoon, or violoncello, but only the snoring of our own nose, could rouse us. That there are occasional snatches of melody is undeniable, but a snatch here and there is not the grasp of a master hand to hold an audience. Judicious selections will always be welcome; but that, taken as a whole, it is the embodiment of stupendous boredom, might be the verdict of all English opera-goers who delight in the Operas of Rossini, Mozart, Meyerbeer, Gounod, Verdi, Balfe, Wallace, Bizet, and we are not afraid to add, even in these days of æsthetic mysticism, art-vagueness, and higher cultchaw--Bellini.

_Punch_ then proceeds to "guy" the libretto and stage directions and continues:--

This sort of music can never, in our lifetime at least, thank goodness, become popular with the British public. It may, as Dr. Johnson said of the violoncello performance, be wonderful, but we only wish it were impossible. Wagner's lyrical-dramatic music requires no operatic vocalists at all. Let there be a first-rate orchestra, a book of the plot in hands of the audience, and tableaux vivants or dissolving views to illustrate it--as illustration is still necessary for the illiterate. To ourselves, speaking as mere laics in the matter, with a fondness for tune, harmony, and good dramatic situations, it seems that singing and acting are thrown away on such vocal music and such tedious and unsavoury libretti. Richard Wagner's Operas will be remembered when the _Barbiere_ and a few more trifles are forgotten, but not till then.

And then Wagner inconsiderately went and died a few months later, and _Punch_, who was never given to indulging in war-dances over his dead enemies, printed not exactly a palinode, but a liberal acknowledgment that this "arch-revolutionist" of the brood of "Demiurgus militant" was a considerable figure. Given his temperament and aims, _Punch_ asks:--

What wonder He brought the sword into mild Music's sphere, And in the clangour of the hurtling spear, The clashing mail, and the loud battle-thunder, Missed, sometime, of the finer harmony The still small voice, known of the subtler ear, Which outlives all War's clarions? Year on year May pass ere he is measured. Yet we see The work of a strong shaper, one whose part Was with new light to show a newer way. He stripped the gewgaw'd shams of Opera, Lord of two spheres, he wedded Art with Art, And Music, sunned in brighter, larger fame, May date its nobler dawn from Wagner's mighty name.

[Sidenote: _"The Beggar's Opera" in 1878_]

The splendid Indian summer of Verdi's genius which gave us _Aïda_, _Otello_ and _Falstaff_ is only partially recognized. When Aïda was produced in 1876 _Punch_ was more interested in Patti and Nicolini, the magnificence of the mounting and the chatter of the boxes, than in the music. In the _finale_ "the brass was everywhere, the voices nowhere." _Punch_ was happier in dealing with _Carmen_, in which Nietzsche, after he had abandoned Wagnerism, found the exemplification of his dictum "_il faut Méditerraniser la musique_," and which has won the allegiance of all schools. And it is interesting in view of the wonderful success recently achieved by the revival of _The Beggar's Opera_ to read _Punch's_ eulogies of Sims Reeves, when the famous tenor appeared at Covent Garden as Captain Macheath in 1878. But here again he is more interested in Sims Reeves's singing and acting than in the play or the music:--

It was a treat. But what a stupid play! What a set of sordid, squalid, ruffianly characters, all, except Polly Peachum, prettily played by Madame Cave-Ashton, who obtained more than one encore. The chorus of "Let us take the Road" was very effectively given. I should like to see _The Beggar's Opera_ with a well remodelled plot, an efficient cast, to include, of course, Mr. Sims Reeves (it would be nothing at all without his Captain Macheath) and Madame Cave-Ashton, and produced under such careful stage-management as was shown by Mr. Hare in bringing out _Olivia_ at the Court Theatre. However, for the present, _The Beggar's Opera_, which, I believe, was the result of a considerable amount of "collaboration," is, as played the other night at Covent Garden, good enough, by way of a musical treat, for Your Representative.

What _Punch_ wished to see forty years ago has been achieved under the inspiring direction of Mr. Nigel Playfair, though not exactly on the lines indicated.

Cherishing an old-fashioned weakness for a tune, _Punch_ naturally deplored the passing of Offenbach, one of the greatest tune-coiners of the century. The memorial lines in October, 1880, are an admirable summary of the qualities which made Offenbach the musical incarnation of the unbridled gaiety of the Second Empire. But it is rather a surprise to find an allusion to "Golden Schneider" in view of _Punch's_ earlier castigation of that ultra-vivacious lady. For the rest _Punch_ was still true to the tradition expressed in the avowal of the Philistine who said he would rather hear Offenbach than Bach often. Regret of a very different temper inspires the tribute to Jenny Lind, _Punch's_ favourite singer, on her death in 1887. Forty years earlier he had christened her "the Nightingale that sings in Winter," and recognized her unfailing response to all charitable appeals:--

"Dear Jenny Lind!" So then his song addressed her Who still is "Jenny Lind," and still is dear. Though Genius praised, and Fashion's crowd caressed her, She sank not, like some stars, below her sphere Into those darkening mists Whose taint the true and tender heart resists. Her nature fame was powerless to soil, Whom splendour hardened not, and puffery could not spoil.

How the crowd rushed and crushed, and cheered and clamoured, Forty years syne, to hang upon her song! Of _La Sonnambula's_ heroine enamoured, Thrilled by the flute-like trillings sweet as strong Of their dear Nightingale. Amina, Lucia, Alice, each they'd hail With fervent plaudits, in whose flush and stir Love of her silvery song was blent with love of her.

And each well earned! The crowd would press and jostle To hear their favourite warbler, from whose throat, Clear as the lark, and mellow as the throstle, The limpid melody would soar and float. Now like a shattered lute, The Nightingale who sang in winter's mute; But long remembered that pure life shall be, To Music dedicate and vowed to Charity.

[Sidenote: _Jean and Edouard de Reszke_]

The idols of the operatic world in _Punch's_ earlier days were mainly Italian or trained in Italy. In the period which we have now reached no single nation retained a monopoly of "stars." Madame Nordica, who appeared in 1890, was an American, Madame Melba was Australian-born of Scottish descent, and the two de Reszkes, Jean and Edouard, the chief glories of many recurrent seasons at Covent Garden, were Poles. A hundred years earlier Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, a famous amateur and critic, declared that the French opera singers were excruciating to listen to. In the late 'eighties and 'nineties the best singing was heard from those who had been trained in Paris. The de Reszkes in particular helped to achieve what _Punch_ had declared to be impossible--they made Wagner popular among the fashionable opera-goers by singing his later works as they had never been sung before, turning to them at the zenith of their powers and reputation, a service to art which more self-protective singers have sedulously avoided. Jean de Reszke was great in _Faust_, _Roméo et Juliette_, _Aïda_, _Le Prophète_, but he was greater as Siegfried and Tristan. And so with his brother Edouard, when his Mephistopheles or his Friar Laurence are compared with his Wotan, his Hagen or his King Marke. I have spoken elsewhere of the disastrous National Opera House scheme of Mapleson and the _fiasco_ of the Royal English Opera House in Shaftesbury Avenue. _Ivanhoe_, Sullivan's solitary excursion into the domain of grand opera, which was written for the opening of the last-named building, did not achieve more than a _succès d'estime_. _Punch's_ notice is friendly but not enthusiastic. When it gave place to the _Basoche_, he summed up the situation facetiously but shrewdly enough under the heading, "English Opera as She isn't sung":--

It seems impossible to support a Royal English Opera House with its special commodity of English Opera, that is, Opera composed by an Englishman to an Englishman's libretto, and played by English operatic singers. _Ivanhoe_, a genuine English Opera, by a genuine English Composer (with an Irish name), produced with great éclat, has, after a fair run and lots of favour, been Doylécarté, in order to make room for the _Basoche_, an essentially French Opera, by a French Composer and Librettist, done, of course, into English, so as to be "understanded of the people." The _Basoche_ has "caught on," and our friends in front, including Composer, Librettist, and Middleman--Druriolanus, who bought it, and Doyly Carty, who bought it of Sir Druri--are all equally pleased and satisfied. Considered as a matter of business, what signifies the nationality as long as the spec pays?--_tout est là_.

"Druriolanus" was _Punch's_ ingenious _agnomen_ for Augustus Harris, who, beginning as a melodramatic actor, had blossomed into a manager and operatic _impresario_ and was knighted in 1891. It was at the close of the same year that Mascagni's _Cavalleria Rusticana_ was first produced in England, scored a success which the composer has never succeeded in recapturing, and established the tyranny of the "Intermezzo," which is not even yet overpast. Verga's powerful story of love and revenge, on which the libretto is based, counted for much, but the crude emotional vigour of the score is not to be denied. _Punch_ adored the "Intermezzo," speaks of the "charm" of the music, but says nothing of the plot. The Italian Company in 1891 were only moderately good; Madame Calvé's marvellously tragic impersonation of Santuzza, in the season of 1892, is inseparably associated in the minds of middle-aged opera-goers with Mascagni's solitary triumph.

[Sidenote: _Gilbert and Sullivan_]

When we turn from grand to comic opera, the names of Gilbert and Sullivan confront us throughout the entire period under review in a light that sheds a still undiminished lustre on native art. Of each of the two partners in this long and fruitful collaboration it may be said, in the often quoted phrase, that if not absolutely great he was great in his _genre_. Between them they created an entirely new type of light opera. Moreover, it was an entirely English or British product in its spirit and structure, and relied entirely on British performers. _Punch_ welcomed the venture from the outset, and in 1880, in some verses modelled on the Judge's song in _Trial by Jury_, and anticipating Sullivan's knighthood in 1883, he happily summarizes the career of the composer, with whom, by the way, Burnand had been associated in _Cox and Box_ in 1866:--

As a boy I had such a musical bump, And its size so struck Mr. Helmore, That he said, "Though you sing those songs like a trump, You shall write some yourself that will sell more." So I packed off to Leipsic, without _looking back_,[13] And returned in such classical fury, That I sat down with Handel and Haydn and Bach-- And turned out _Trial by Jury_.

But W.S.G. he jumped for joy As he said, "Though the job dismay you, Send Exeter Hall to the deuce, my boy; It's the _haul_ with me that'll pay you." And we hauled so well, mid jeers and taunts That we've settled, spite all temptations, To stick to our Sisters and our Cousins and our Aunts-- And continue our pleasant relations.

[Footnote 13: The title of one of Sullivan's most popular songs.]

In 1885, on the occasion of the production of the _Mikado_, which _Punch_ bracketed with _Pinafore_ as the best of all the series, there are some excellent observations on the dual autocracy exerted to admiration at the Savoy:--

Rarely, if ever, have Composer and Author produced piece after piece under conditions so favourable to success as have Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan at the Savoy. They are their own Managers, the theatre is practically theirs, the Members of the Company, from the soprano and tenor down to the latest novice in the chorus, or among the "extras," depend mainly, if not entirely, upon the Composer and Author for their engagements. This Beaumont and Fletcher of Eccentric Opera can order rehearsals when they choose, can command the scene-painters and property-men, and, what is much more to the point, be obeyed. They have jointly and separately the authority of the Centurion: the Author is the autocrat of the acting and the Savoy stage generally; the Composer is the autocrat of the music, vocal and instrumental.

[Sidenote: _The Savoy Autocrats_]

At other theatres an Author may try to assume the autocrat, but, unless he can be absolutely independent, and able to take his piece out of the theatre without damaging his chance of earning a livelihood, the attempt is only a ridiculous and palpable failure. True that times have changed, considerably for the better, since Albert Smith said that "there was only one person in the theatre lower than the call-boy, and that was the Author," yet, in spite of much improvement, a young Dramatist will still sympathize with the spirit of Albert Smith's observation; and, ordinarily, the most experienced Playwright, if not, as I have said, absolutely independent, has, in almost every instance, to accommodate himself to the exigencies of the theatre, and to the tempers of the Actors. From the moment he has a piece in rehearsal, there is no peace for him on the Stage. He is promised what he will never obtain; he has to accept just what he can get; he has to humour the ideas of others and sacrifice his own; he has to make the best of unintentional mistakes and deliberately intentional alterations; he has to accede to the Manager's date for producing the piece, and its first night of public performance is, in the majority of cases, really and truly only a dressed rehearsal, and, in some cases, it is the first real rehearsal the piece has had.

Now nothing of this sort ought to take place at the Savoy. There Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan have only themselves to please, only themselves and their piece to consider; they are monarchs of all they Savoy--I should say "survey"--they are masters of the situation, and if they allow any piece of theirs to be produced in a hurry, with incomplete appointments, with inappropriate scenery, faulty dresses, or after insufficient rehearsal, on their own heads be it and on no one else's. The Actor-singers are only intelligent puppets in their Showman's hands, and the more faithfully they carry out the instructions given them by their masters, the greater their individual and collective chance of success.

It delights me to see the precision of the action on the Stage of the Savoy, the result of a carefully-thought-out plan and well-regulated drill. The principals have been judiciously selected for the work, and they are suited by the two clever fellow-workers who, having taken their measure to a nicety, give them just what they can do, and no more; and who insist on their original conceptions being executed exactly according to their ideas. The result is that the ensemble is about the most effective thing in London--or in Paris for that matter--because the individuality of the Actor-singer is not destroyed, but is judiciously made use of, and worked up, as valuable material for the character he has to represent.

_Patience_ in 1881 specially appealed to _Punch_ because it was aimed against the æsthetes. His general appreciation of the Savoy Operas was, however, tempered by criticism. For example, he pronounces _Iolanthe_ in 1882 to be "not within a mile of _Pinafore_ and not a patch upon _Patience_." _The Gondoliers_ in 1890 is placed third in order of excellence after the _Mikado_ and _Pinafore_. The unfortunate temporary estrangement between the collaborators which led to the severance of their partnership in the same year, and which was alleged to have grown out of a dispute over a carpet, is treated in "A Chapter of Dickens up to Date," with Gilbert as Mrs. Gamp and Sullivan as Mrs. Prig. _Punch's_ view of the merits of the dispute may be gathered from the fact that he gives the last word to Mrs. Prig, who, after alluding to a tempest in a teapot, observes: "Wich I don't believe there's either rhyme or reason in sech an absurd quarrel!" Yet when the _Court Circular_ of March 9, 1891, recorded the performance at Windsor Castle of _The Gondoliers_, "a Comic Opera composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan," with full details of the programme, performers, etc., but no mention of Gilbert at all, _Punch_ rubs in this conspicuous absence in his most sarcastic vein.

Mr. D'Oyly Carte, it seems, was presented to the Queen after the performance, and _Punch_ goes on:--

Did R. D'Oyly think of mentioning that "the words" were by W.S.G.? And then it is told how D'Oyly refused to take any payment for the performance. Noble, generous-hearted, large-minded and liberal D'Oyly! Sir Arthur Courtly Sullivan's name was to the Bill, and so his consent to this extra act of generosity may be taken for granted. But what said Sir Brian de Bois Gilbert? By the merry-maskins, but an he be not pleased, dub me Knight Samingo! Will D'Oyly be dubbed Knight? And what sort of Knight? Well, remembering a certain amusing little episode in the more recent history of the Savoy Theatre, why not a "Carpet Knight"?

If _Punch_ kept most of his friendships in good repair, it must be admitted that he also displayed on occasion a positive genius for impish malice.

[Sidenote: _Liszt, Rubinstein, Pachmann_]

Among the musical celebrities who visited us in these years _Punch_ had a special word for Joachim, to whom England was almost a second home, and Madame Schumann, whose portrait with that of the great violinist appears in 1881. M. Pachmann's performance at a concert in 1883 is described with more fidelity than reverence:--

Then came a M. Vladimir de Pachmann, who, in consequence of his long hair, and a bulkiness about his waist and coat-tails suggestive of concealed fish-bowls, to be presently produced from under a handkerchief, I at first set down as a Conjurer. He wasn't, however, being a Pianist of considerable skill, with an overpowering propensity for getting the most out of every note, and listening in rapt admiration to its dying away in the distance, and then slowly raising his left hand as if pronouncing a blessing on the instrument as he went along.

Liszt and Rubinstein (who once said that compared with Liszt all other pianists, including himself, were mere wood-choppers) both visited England in 1886--Rubinstein still in the full possession of his powers, which he displayed in his remarkable cycle of seven historical recitals; Liszt, full of years and honours, but claiming attention as a composer, not as a performer, though he did play once or twice in private. The mention of the performance of his oratorio _St. Elizabeth_ in St. James's Hall comes home to the present writer, who was a humble member of the chorus. _Punch's_ notice is an adroit blending of facetiousness and respect. In his Postscript he observes, "How tired Liszt must be of hearing his own music! Fancy Pears being treated for a whole week to nothing but his own Soap!" I wonder whether _Punch_ knew, what was the fact, that Liszt fell asleep in the performance of his own oratorio. Three months later he died at Bayreuth, having never recovered from the exhaustion caused by the lionizing hospitality of his English admirers. Rubinstein survived his visit for eight years. _Punch_ was not far out in describing him in 1886 as the first player in the world. He was then fifty-seven, and his playing of Beethoven's Op. 57--the _Appassionata_ Sonata--beggared description. Rubinstein used to say that in these recitals he played enough wrong notes to make a symphony; he was at times violent and extravagant and took strange liberties with the text. But here he was Titanic, and _Punch's_ welcome was well deserved, though the critic erred in ranking Rubinstein the composer on the same plane with Rubinstein the performer. It is amusing to read, in the reference to the last recital, that the programme included works by

--such small contemporary deer as Liadoff, Balakireff, Rimsky-Korsakoff, and César Cui. My gracious! What names! Familiar, too, don't they seem? In the same category the patronymic of Tschaikowski rings refreshingly as that of an old friend.

The spelling of foreign musicians' names had always been a stumbling block to _Punch_, and I have revised his versions of two of the composers mentioned above, but by 1886 he had at least learned to spell Liszt correctly.

Hans Richter had shared the duties of conductor at the Wagner Festival of 1877 with the great composer himself. The concerts which made his name a household word in the musical world began in 1879. His leonine appearance and Olympian calm, his wonderful memory, which enabled him to conduct the great masterpieces, classical and modern, without a score; and the dignity and authority of his interpretations soon gained for him an admiration which survived his repudiation in 1914 of all the honours and distinctions conferred on him by the country in which for many years he had made his home. There are still a good many orchestral players amongst us who have a warm corner in their hearts for the "Doctor," and a profound respect for his mastery of the high art of conducting. His quaint sayings are legion, and ought to be collected. One of the best is his rebuke of his band at a rehearsal of the _Venusberg_ music: "Gentlemen, you play it as if you were teetotallers, _which you are not_."

_Punch_ acclaimed him as a master in 1886, and his tribute is all the more remarkable because it is coupled with an unexpected acknowledgment of the genius of Brahms, whose Fourth Symphony, a very tough nut to crack in those days, is contrasted with the "howling balderdash" of other moderns. Paderewski, who made his first appearance in the spring of 1890, is handsomely extolled. His first concert, which the present writer attended, only attracted a meagre audience, but the effect on his hearers was electrifying and the _crescendo_ of popularity was immediate and abiding. _Punch_, of course, made puns on his name, but in these years he was so consistent an offender that he might very well have appropriated the old doggerel confession:--

If for every pun I shed I were to be punishèd, I could not find a puny shed Wherein to hide my punnish head.

[Sidenote: _The Plague of Prodigies_]

London has never been free from the plague of prodigies, but the epidemic was acute in 1888, and _Punch_ treated the matter in a style which has a strangely familiar ring--when allowance is made for the usual puns:--

That there is a regular flood of these musical prodigies threatening to sweep over every concert-hall platform, there is not a doubt; and while the public rush in applauding crowds to welcome them, it is not easy to see where it is to stop. As long as the fever lasts, their parents, whatever their weight, may be counted upon to keep hurrying them to the "scales," and set them down to the key-board practising till they are often literally laid on their _Bachs_. Meantime, while the infants struggle, it is becoming a serious question for the regular adult performers, who will find their occupation gone, and certainly not know what to do with themselves, if the former are to have it all their own way. For them, whatever the public may think of it, the matter will undoubtedly be no mere "child's play," and they will surely hail any signs indicating that this recent determined invasion of the concert-room by the nursery is at all on the wane, with every expression of unfeigned delight.

The subject is handled more judiciously in one of the admirable "_Voces Populi_" series; best of all in Du Maurier's "Happy Thought":--

MRS. TRIPLETS: "And how is your concert getting on, Herr Pfeiffer?"

EMINENT VIOLINIST: "Pudiful, as far as de Brogramme is goncerned--Beethoven--Schumann--Brahms! But ze dickets don't zell!! Ach! Py ze vay, Mrs. Triplets, you don't happen to haf zoch a zing as a Moozicalish Infantile Venomenon apout you zat you could lend me for ze occasion. Ja? Gonzertina! Pantscho! Pones! Gomb! Anyzing vill blease ze Pritish Boblic, if ze berformer is onter vife years olt!"

_Punch_ was in his element when Eduard Strauss--son of Johann the elder, and brother of the most famous of all the Viennese Waltz-Kings, Johann Strauss of the _Blue Danube_ and the _Fledermaus_--brought his band to the Inventions Exhibition in 1885. In these days waltzing was still popular, and on the page overleaf I give two phases in its evolution as recorded by the pen of Du Maurier. Eduard Strauss wrote many delightful waltzes, and was an inspiring if somewhat exuberant conductor. _Punch_, who had sat under Jullien in his boyhood, compares the methods of the two, and pronounces the performance of dance-music by Strauss's band to be a revelation. "It unvulgarizes even the polka, and, from time to time, imparts an elevating tone to that ungraceful and prosaic dance." Finally _Punch_ rewrites C. F. Adams's "Leedle Yawcob Strauss" in honour of the Waltz-King:--

He hops und schumps und marks der time, Und shows such taste and nous, Dot dere's to equal him no vun, Mine clever Eduard Strauss.

* * * * *

He dakes der viddle in his hands, Und he schust blay it, too! He dake der schtick to beat der time, Mine gracious, dot vos drue.

Und ven der beeble hear dot band Dey at each oder glance, Den vag deir heads, den move deir veet, Und vish dot dey might dance.

Und ven dey blay der "Danube Blue," Vich vos vor an encore, Dey velcome it as zomtings new, Und call for it vonce more.

Der beeble listen as dey blay As guiet as a mouse, Dere's none vor dance tunes any day Like leedle Eduard Strauss.

The cult of Berlioz, started by Hallé at Manchester in 1880, was now in full swing, and his _Faust_ figures constantly in the programmes of choral concerts and festivals, with Henschel and Santley (who had abandoned opera for oratorio), Mary Davies and Edward Lloyd in the principal rôles. _Punch_ did not overlook the provincial festivals in the days when the standard quartet was made up of Mmes. Albani and Patey--whose likeness to Handel was noted by Samuel Butler--Edward Lloyd and Santley. He was present at Leeds in 1886 when Sir Arthur Sullivan conducted his _Golden Legend_, and Stanford his exhilarating _Revenge_. Sullivan is saluted as "the English Offenbach," a somewhat two-edged compliment, though meant sincerely. At Gloucester, in 1889, _Punch_ praises the music of Parry's _Judith_, but damns the libretto: "_Punch_ and _Judith_ can never agree." No subject, sacred or profane, was secure from _Punch's_ puns. _The Golden Legend_ and _The Prodigal Son_, both by Sullivan, were included in the programme at Gloucester, and are turned to characteristic account in the following comment:--

The _Golden Legend_ is a traditional tale of a fortune amassed at Gloucester by an hotel-keeper during the Festival week; while _The Prodigal Son_ is the sad story of a young man who, in spite of his father's warnings, lived an entire week at a Gloucester Inn.

The Royal College of Music was founded in 1882. George Grove, the first director, the "dear 'G'" of countless friends in all walks of life, was an old ally, and the venture, in which the Prince of Wales took from the very outset an active and energetic part, received _Punch's_ benediction, though an element of genial chaff is not absent in the picture of the Prince conducting his orchestra of royal and noble minstrels, with the Duke of Edinburgh as first violin. _Punch_ showed a truer insight into the potentialities of the new institution when he suggested that it might help to solve the problem of National Opera. By its annual operatic performances so admirably directed for some thirty years by Sir Charles Stanford, and by the training of first-class instrumentalists and singers, the R.C.M. has done an amount of spade-work which has more than fulfilled _Punch's_ prediction.

[Sidenote: _Popular Songs_]

On the educative value of the music-halls _Punch_ in earlier years had maintained an attitude of scepticism, not to say hostility. He had been careful to draw invidious distinctions between the vulgarity of music-hall comedians and the entertainments provided by the German Reeds and Corney Grain, in whom he recognized "one in ten thousand" and a true follower of John Parry, the father and perhaps the greatest of all musical entertainers, whose _vis comica_, allied to unfailing good taste and reinforced by remarkable musicianship, had won the admiration of Lablache and Malibran. I have noted elsewhere _Punch's_ disparagement of the efforts to improve the music-halls. He displays a certain lukewarm approval of the prospectus of the "Coffee Music Hall Company, Limited," issued in 1879 under the auspices of Lord and Lady Cowper, Mr. and Mrs. Cowper-Temple, Sir Charles Trevelyan and Canon Duckworth; the names of Mr. and Mrs. German Reed and Sir Jules Benedict, however, inspired him with more confidence than their aristocratic co-patrons.

The popular songs of the hour seldom failed to attract _Punch's_ vigilant censure. In 1887 "Two Lovely Black Eyes" enchanted the million. It was well parodied in the series of "Popular Songs Resung" by "Miss Virginia Bowdler" in 1891, and in 1889 _Punch_ published his excellent "Model Music-Hall Songs." The song that broke his heart in 1891 was "Hi-tiddly-hi-ti"; in 1892 a "Melancholy Muser" is plunged into despair by the "Ta-ra-ra" boom:--

I am shrouded in impenetrable gloom-de-ay, For I feel I'm being driven to my doom-de-ay, By an aggravating ditty Which I don't consider witty; And they call the horrid thing, "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!"

Every 'bus-conductor, errand-boy, and groom-de-ay, City clerk, and cheeky crossing-sweep with broom-de-ay Makes my nervous system bristle As he tries to sing or whistle That atrocious and absurd "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!"

So I sit in the seclusion of my room-de-ay, And deny myself to all--no matter whom-de-ay-- For I dread a creature coming Whose involuntary humming May assume the fatal form, "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!"

Oh, I fear that when the Summer roses bloom-de-ay, You will read upon a well-appointed tomb-de-ay: "Influenza never lick'd him, But he fell an easy victim To that universal scourge--'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!'"

The amazing popularity of Mr. Albert Chevalier's coster songs is acknowledged in 1892, but _Punch_ hardly does justice to the talents of the creator of what was virtually a new and specialized type of comic song heavily larded with sentiment.

HEROES AND WORTHIES

In the course of these chapters mention has not infrequently been made of the homage paid by _Punch_ to his special heroes and heroines. Memorial verses had always been a feature of the paper, and in the beginning of this period they assumed formidable dimensions: at its close there was a welcome reaction towards brevity; but in the following anthology I have not always quoted these tributes in full, preferring to extract the stanzas or lines which seemed to me to come nearest the mark in truth of portraiture or felicity of expression. Thus, while other features of Charles Kingsley's work in life and letters are noted in the verses printed on his death in 1875, his achievement in the domain of historical romance is much the most happily treated:--

He raised strong Saxon Hereward from death In his grey shroud of mist from mere and fen; Called up the England of Elizabeth, With Drake and Raleigh, chief of Devon men.

To 1878 belong the lines on the "Christian athlete" Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand and afterwards of Lichfield:--

At length from work he rests, and to the bier His good deeds follow him, and good men's love; And one true Bishop less we reckon here, And one good angel more they count above.

The epitaph on Lord John Russell, who died three weeks after his golden wedding in 1878, applauds his consistency but is not memorable, though he is well described as a fighter for freedom "in spite of what was done in Freedom's name."

The lines on the great John Lawrence in July, 1879, contain one good stanza:--

A simple mannered, rude and rugged man, But true and wise and merciful and just. Of all these monuments, when all we scan, Which rises o'er more justly honoured dust?

[Sidenote: _Rowland Hill, Stanley, and Darwin._]

Rowland Hill, always one of _Punch's_ special heroes, was buried in the Abbey in September of the same year. Here _Punch's_ best tribute is in prose, when he speaks of him as

One of the greatest benefactors to his country and to the civilized world that it ever produced; now inhabiting an abode among the band of departed worthies who in this life were heroes and saints and bards of the better sort:--

_Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes_.

The verses on Dean Stanley in July, 1881, are not quoted in his _Life_ by Lord Ernle, so I make no excuse for printing them here:--

With clear, calm eye he fronted Faith, and she, Despite the clamorous crowd, Smiled, knowing her soul-loyal votary At no slave's altar bowed. With forward glance beyond polemic scope He scanned the sweep of Time, And everywhere changed looks with blue-eyed Hope, Victress o'er doubt and crime. But inward turning, he, of gentle heart, And spirit mild as free, More gladly welcomed, as life's better part, The rule of Charity.

_Punch's_ most generous acknowledgment of the genius of Charles Darwin was published in 1877:--

THREE ILLUSTRATIONS OF A THEORY

Though dogmatists and dullards long opposed His Theory with venomous persistence, Darwin may now consider it has closed Its--"Struggle for existence."

To calm research, not fierce polemic raid, Truth yields her secrets. After fair inspection The age twixt Science and her foes has made A--"Natural selection."

Thou canst not, Zealotry, as blind as hot, Truth's champion slay, however hard thou hittest. Darwin outlives detraction. Is this not "Survival of the fittest"?

When Darwin died in April, 1882, _Punch_ had entered on a phase in which the claims of science to solve the riddle of the universe excited his misgiving, and his obituary lines are of a non-committal order, save for one admirable couplet:--

Recorder of the long Descent of Man And a most living witness of his rise.

There are no reserves in his valediction to Henry Fawcett in November, 1884:--

No braver conquest o'er ill fortune's flout Our age has seen than his who held straight on, Though the great God-gift from his days was gone, "And Wisdom at one entrance quite shut out"-- Held on with genial stoutness, seeing more Than men with sight undarkened, but with mind Through prejudice and Party bias blind.

Another statesman of equal fearlessness and independence was W. E. Forster; but here the whole virtue of _Punch's_ salutation in April, 1886, is summed up in the two lines:--

A sturdy lover of a sturdy land, He served it, zeal at heart and life in hand.

I pass over the "In Memoriam" lines on the good Lord Shaftesbury in the previous year. They render full justice to his splendid and life-long service on behalf of the "helpless thralls of trade" and the "all unchildlike children" "victims of modern Molochs," "all who creep or fall on poverty's rough road or crime's steep slope"; but they are otherwise laboured and diffuse. Sincerity is no guarantee of literary excellence. _Punch_ shows to greater advantage in the lines on Newman in August, 1890, who is lauded, not as a great Cardinal nor as one

Above all office and all state, Serenely wise, magnanimously great; Not as the pride of Oriel, or the Star Of this host or of that in creed's hot war, But as the noble spirit, stately, sweet, Ardent for good without fanatic heat, Gentle of soul, though greatly militant, Saintly, yet with no touch of cloistral cant; Him England honours, and so bends to-day In reverent grief o'er Newman's glorious clay.

[Sidenote: _Lord Granville and W. H. Smith_]

Two statesmen, widely differing in birth, temperament and character, are commemorated in 1891. Of Lord Granville _Punch_ writes:--

Bismarckian vigour, stern and stark As Brontë's self, was not his dower; Not his to steer a storm-tost bark Through waves that whelm, and clouds that lower. Temper unstirred, unerring tact Were his. He could not "wave the banner," But he could lend to steely act The softly silken charm of manner.

Mr. W. H. Smith was a much harder subject for eulogy, for he was not a "dæmonic genius," an orator, or a romantic figure, but simply a good plain honest servant of his country. Yet _Punch's_ verses, if not inspired by high poetic rapture, are something more than adequate in their appreciation of Mr. W. H. Smith's solid qualities:--

A capable, clear-headed, modest toiler, Touched with no egoist taint, To Duty sworn, the face of the Despoiler Made him not fear or faint.

O'erworn, o'erworked, with smiling face, though weary, The tedious task he plied; Sagacious, courteous, ever calm and cheery, Unsoured by spleen or pride.

As unprovocative as unpretentious, Skilful though seeming slow; Unmoved by impulse of conceit contentious To risk success for show.

O rare command of gifts, which, common branded, Are yet so strangely rare! Selflessness patient, judgment even-handed, And spirit calmly fair!

To turn from grave to gay, I may round off this collection with two zoological elegies. When "Jumbo," the famous elephant at the Zoo, whose purchase by Barnum and departure from London had provoked a grotesque explosion of sentimentality, was killed by a railway accident in America in 1885, Punch recorded his decease in the following epigram:--

Alas, poor Jumbo! Here's the fruit Of faithless Barnum's greed of gain; How sad that so well-trained a brute Should owe his exit to a train!

The elegy on Charles Jamrach, the celebrated naturalist and menagerie-keeper of St. George's-in-the-East, who died in September, 1891, at the age of seventy-six, was better deserved. Charles Jamrach, the most notable of the dynasty which for three-quarters of a century enjoyed a practical monopoly of the trade in wild animals in this country, was a "stout fellow": Frank Buckland describes his single-handed struggle with a runaway tiger in 1857; he appears in the D.N.B.; and _Punch_, in his lines on "The King of the Beasts," after describing the lamentations of the animals at the Zoo, ends up on a note of genuine regret:--

O Jamrach! O Jamrach! Woe's stretched on no sham rack Of metre that mourns you sincerely; E'en that hard nut o' natur, the great Alligator, Has eyes that look red, and blink queerly. Mere "crocodile's tears," some may snigger, but jeers Must disgust at a moment so doleful; For Jamrach the brave, who has gone to his grave, All our sorrow's sincere as 'tis soulful!

PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, LONDON, E.C.4.

_A complete Index will be found in the Fourth Volume._