Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 3 of 4.—1874-1892

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.

(With verses by Jellaby Postlethwaite, who is also said to have sat for the Picture.)

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 funWas ever loyal to the Graces;Who mixed the mirth of Gilpin's runWith willowy forms and winsome faces;Who made old nursery lyrics liveWith frolic force rejuvenated,And yet the sweetest girls could giveThat ever pencil-point created.From Bracebridge Hall to Banbury CrossHis 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 penWhilst Philistia looked on and laughed at those Three Mighty Men.

Prigs and Philistines

(Ineffable Youth goes into ecstasies over an extremely Old Master – say, Fra Porcinello Babaragianno, A.D. 1266-1281?)

Matter-of-fact Party: "But it's such a repulsive subject!"

Ineffable Youth: "'Subject' in art is of no moment! The Picktchah is beautiful!"

Matter-of-fact Party: "But you'll own the Drawing's vile, and the Colour's beastly!"

Ineffable Youth: "I'm Cullah-blind, and don't p'ofess to understand D'awing! The Picktchah is beautiful!"

Matter-of-fact Party (getting warm): "But it's all out of Perspective, hang it, and so abominably untrue to Nature!"

Ineffable Youth: "I don't care about Naytchah, and hate Perspective. The Picktchah is most beautiful!"

Matter-of-fact Party (losing all self-control): "But, dash it all, man, where the dickens is the beauty, then?"

Ineffable Youth (quietly): "In the Picktchah!"

Total defeat of Matter-of-fact Party.

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, anyChippendale 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 SocietySay, here's a house whence æsthetics have fled.

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 atThe 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-poeticWhose 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 anatomicImprover 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 isTied 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."

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."

The Duke of Dilwater: "I – a – have taken the liberty of calling to say that I shall esteem myself highly honoured if you will be so very kind as to accept from me a Commission to paint my Portrait, at any time most convenient to yourself!"

Fashionable Artist (after careful survey of His Grace's features): "You must excuse me, Duke, but I really can't. I – a – always choose my own Subjects now, you know, and I'm sorry to say that your Grace won't do!"

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.

Philistine Father: "Why the dickens don't you paint something like Frith's 'Derby Day' – something everybody can understand, and somebody buy?"

Young Genius: "Everybody understand, indeed! Art is for the few, Father, and the higher the art, of course, the fewer the few. The highest art of all is for one. That art is mine. That one is – myself!"

Fond Mamma: "There speaks my own brave boy!"

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 traceThat 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 briaryWith 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.

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.

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 youThe Picturesque, informed by Soul of Passion!Say, dost thou feed on milk and honey-dew,Draining from goblets deep of classic fashionChampagne 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, EuroclydonAnd Zephyr! Slender Syrian Astarté!With voice the soul of music, like that harpWhich 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 poseAs thou, sweet statuesque slim sinuosity?"Stagey"? Absurd! "The death's-head and the rose"?Delicious! Gives the touch of tenebrosityThat 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's12 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!!!!

"Pierrot à Londres"

First Critic (ætat. 21): "Beats Rachel hollow in Ong-Dromack, hanged if she don't!"

Second Critic (ditto): "So I think, Old man! And in L'Etrong-jair she licks Mademoiselle Mars all to fits!"