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

For still, oh hawk-eyed Harmsworth, you pursueWith more than all the ardour of a lover,From find to check and so from check to viewYour scapegoat-hunt from covert into covert.

As for the test of circulation, Punch betrays a certain scepticism in his remarks on "The People's Pulse" in 1903: —

The account given by the Daily Mail, in Saturday's issue, of its daily circulation for the last eight months, together with the leading event of each day, ought to be kept up from time to time as a Permanent People's Pulse Report. Nothing could be more instructive than to note, for instance, that while the Delhi Durbar only attracted 844,799 readers, the "Oyster Scare" allured as many as 846,501; while "Lord Dalmeny's Coming of Age" brought the figures up to 847,080, and the "Sardine Famine" accounted for a further increase of 14,586. Or, again, there is a world of significance in the fact that the relative attractions of the "Poet Laureate's Play" and "Mr. Seddon's Meat Shops" are represented by a balance of 5,291 in favour of the Napoleon of New Zealand.

Life was certainly made livelier by the new methods introduced, with variations, from America, and Punch feelingly contrasts the drab existence of those who lived before with that of those who lived under the Harmsworth régime: —

Drear was the lot, minus the Mail,Of soldier, sailor, ploughboy, tinker;And worse, whenever they grew pale,They had no pills to make them pinker.

It is a nice question whether we owe more to the pink pill or to the Yellow Press. But there can be no doubt as to the influence of the new journalism on sport and pastime. Until then, in Punch's phrase, "cricket was still a childish game and not a penman's serious study." Henceforth the cricketer fulfilled a double function. He not only played cricket but he wrote about it – and himself. Under the heading "The Cricketer on the Hearth," in 1899, Punch publishes an imaginary interview à la mode with Mr. Slogger. We omit the complacent autobiographical passages and content ourselves with the sequel: —

"Well, that's pretty well all, I think, except you'll probably want to print at length my opinions on the Transvaal Question, Wagner's Music, and the Future of Agriculture. These will have an overpowering interest for your readers."

"Here are a few photographs of myself – but it's rather too heavy a parcel to carry. I'll send it round in a van. Of course you'll print them all. And now I must ask you to excuse me, as it's time to get into flannels."

I thanked him for his courtesy, and hoped that he'd make a fine score in the county match. He stared at me in surprise. "County Match? You don't imagine I've time to play cricket nowadays, do you? No; I'm going to change because half-a-dozen photographers will be here directly, and they like to take me in costume. And after that I shall have to see seven or eight more interviewers. Good morning!"

The Cricket Journalist

The intrusion of the emotional literary "note" in articles on pastime came later, and is parodied in the article (in 1904) "Do we take our amusements seriously enough?" by Mr. C. B. F: —

The frivolity of the Press is only paralleled by the frivolity of the public. Take the light and airy way in which the spectators at our great cricket grounds treat the imposing functions provided for them. Suppose little (but heroic) Johnny Tyldesley runs out to that wily, curling ball which sunny-faced Wilfred Rhodes pitches thirty-three and three-quarter inches from the block. Up glides his trusty willow, and a fortieth of a second after the ball has pitched descends on the leather. With a wonderful flick of the elbow he chops the ball exactly between square leg and point. Is the raucous "Well hit, Johnny," of the crowd a fitting, a reverent salutation? Our Elizabethan dramatists knew better. Have you not noticed in their stage directions, "A solemn music"? Two or three phrases of Chopin played, let us say, on the French horn by the doyen of the Press-box would be a better tribute to such a miracle of skill. There are, however, elements of better things in our crowds. Before now I have seen the potent Jessop smite a rising ball to the boundary with all the concentrated energy of his Atlantean shoulders, and as the ball reached the ring the spectators with involuntary reverence prostrated themselves before it.

Nor do our greatest men gain the public honours which are their due. In ancient Greece a great athlete was a national hero. The name of Ladas has come down to us through the ages with those of Socrates and Xenophon. Think of the sad contrast in modern England. Why is not Plum Warner (I knew him in long clothes) a Knight of the Garter? Why is not Ranji (exquisitely delicate Ranji – the Walter Pater of the cricket field) Viceroy of India? There are living cricketers, with an average of over eighty, and a dozen centuries in one season to their credit, who have never even been sworn of the Privy Council.

On every side I trace the growth of the same spirit. England is devoting itself to art, politics, literature and theology, and in the rush and hurry of our modern life there is a sad danger that sport will be underrated or overlooked. My countrymen must learn to concentrate their minds on the things which really matter. In your nobler moments would you not rather stand at the wicket than at the table of the House of Commons, or on the political platform of the City Temple, or on the stage of the Alhambra? Save her sport and you save England.

Modern journalistic methods are reduced to absurdity in the account of the staff of a daily paper, who are all football players, cricketers, clairvoyants, crystal-gazers, music-hall artists, or burglars. In the verses on "Journalistic Evolution," in 1907, the tendency to condense everything is specially noted. Leaders have become "leaderettes," and will in turn yield to "leaderettelets"; the writer prophesies a day when The Times will only consist of headlines.

Dasent's Life of Delane appeared in 1908, and Punch's reviewer reminds us of the commanding position occupied by that great editor, who was consulted by all Premiers, except Gladstone, and to whom Palmerston actually offered office. The gist and sting of the review, however, is to be found in a sentence not merely true but almost tragic in its bearings on the history of English journalism: —

Delane accepted the favour of contributions by Cabinet Ministers to his news-chest, but he recognized that the power and influence of The Times were based upon the foundations of public spirit, concern for national interest, and absolute impartiality in dealing with statesmen.

("In view of the grave importance of the present political situation, The Times will be reduced in price to a penny." – Press Association.)

The Times passed under the financial control of Lord Northcliffe at the beginning of 1908, and in the spring of 1914, "in view of the grave importance of the political situation," its price was reduced to one penny. Punch's comment took the form of a cartoon in which the new Dictator of Printing House Square is shown as a salesman at the door of the "Northcliffe Stores" with the legend on a slate, "Thunder is cheap to-day."

Homage to Andrew Lang

By way of contrast with hustling methods Punch had noted with regret the passing in 1905 of Longman's Magazine, in whose pages Mr. Andrew Lang had for many years presided so gracefully "At the Sign of the Ship": —

Formerly, when, sated by sensation,Gentle readers sought an air serene,Refuge from the snapshot's dominationMight be found in Longman's Magazine.There at least the roaring cult of dollarsNever took its devastating way;There the pens of gentlemen and scholarsHeld their uncontaminating sway.There no parasitic bookman prated,No malarious poetasters sang,There all themes were touched and decoratedBy your nimble fancy, Andrew Lang.True, some hobbies you were always riding,– Spooks and spies and totemistic lore;But so deft, so dext'rous was your guiding,No one ever labelled you a bore.But alas! the landmarks that we cherish,Standing for the earlier, better way,Vanquished by vulgarity must perish,Overthrown by "enterprise" decay.Still with fairy books will you regale us,Still pay homage to the sacred Nine,But no more hereafter will you hail usMonthly at the Ship's familiar Sign.There no longer faithfully and gailyWill you deal alike with foes and friends,Wherefore, crying "Ave, atque vale!"Punch his parting salutation sends.

Punch had his own losses to deplore, for in August, 1897, the death of Mr. E. J. Milliken removed a most valuable and fertile member of his staff. Mr. Milliken was not only the creator of "'Arry," and a fluent and dexterous versifier, but he combined with a retentive and accurate memory "the rare talent of most happily applying past literature, whether in history or fiction, to the illustration of contemporary instances," and for a long time had been the chief cartoon-suggester. A longer and more distinguished connexion with Punch was severed in 1906 by the retirement of Sir Frank Burnand after forty-three years' service. He joined in 1863, as the youngest of the staff, and held the editorship for over twenty-five years. In "Just a Few Words at Parting" he defines the aim of the editor in words worthy of remembrance. If Punch was to hold securely the position he had achieved, it should and must be "to provide relaxation for all, fun for all, without a spice of malice or a suspicion of vulgarity, humour without a flavour of bitterness, satire without reckless severity, and nonsense so laughter-compelling as to be absolutely irresistible from its very absurdity." The precept hardly covers the higher function assumed by Punch in "The Song of the Shirt," but, as it stands, had assuredly been faithfully carried into practice by the master of exhilarating burlesque, the intrepid parodist, the author of the immortal Happy Thoughts. As for the personal affection that he inspired in his staff, it is truly expressed in the farewell lines addressed to him by "R. C. L.": —

Dear Frank, our fellow-fighter, how noble was your praise,How kindly rang your welcome on those delightful daysWhen, gathered in your presence, we cheered each piercing hit,And crowned with joy and laughter the rapier of your wit.And if our words grew bitter, and wigs, that should have beenOur heads' serene adornment, were all but on the green,How oft your sunny humour has shone upon the fray,And fused our fiery tempers, and laughed our strife away!

FINE ARTS, DRAMA AND MUSIC

I have noticed in earlier volumes with what asperity Punch assailed the conventionalities of academic and Royal Academic Art; how he became, for a while at any rate, a convert to Pre-Raphaelitism; how, later on, the exhibitors at the Grosvenor Gallery superseded the exponents of fashionable orthodoxy at Burlington House as the targets of his satire; and with what unremitting and undiscriminating zeal he "belaboured" all representatives of the Æsthetic movement. The further progress of this reaction can be traced throughout the first half of the period now under review. In the 'nineties Aubrey Beardsley was his special bête noire; in the early years of the new century the Impressionist school, and by 1910 the Post-Impressionists, furnish him with unfailing matter for caricature. It was not that those who stood on the old ways were exempt from criticism. Year after year the annual summer show at Burlington House never failed to receive a punctual tribute from pen and pencil. But for the most part these notices are inspired by irresponsible frivolity – a desire to extract fun by burlesquing the titles and subjects and treatment quite foreign to the spirit in which Punch had addressed himself to the task in the 'fifties, and even later. The private view of the Academy became for Punch an annual excuse for an explosion of punning, and the illustrations were a faithful counterpart of the text. Yet criticism occasionally emerges from this carnival of jocularity, as when Mr. Sargent's cavalier treatment of details is noted in 1895; or when Punch in 1902 suggests that the formidable congestion of pictures at the R.A. might be relieved by hanging some of them in the refreshment room; or when he writes in 1904: —

An interesting exhibit at the Royal Academy is a drawing executed by the artist when he was only sixteen years of age. Quite a feature of the show, too, is the number of pictures by artists over that age which have the appearance of having been painted by artists under that age.

In 1908 Punch satirized a then prevalent fashion in his drawing of the "Problem Room" at Burlington House, crowded with perplexed spectators dropping their solutions into a box marked "Puzzle Picture Syndicate." When the "Rokeby Venus" was damaged by a militant suffragist in 1914, Punch suggested that the offender ought to be made to serve her term of imprisonment in the Royal Academy – a remark quite in the spirit of his old art-critic, Charles Eastlake.

The oblique and ironical method is admirably employed in the dramatized conversations of visitors to the Academy and other exhibitions. In the sketch "Round the R.A." in 1893 the schoolmistress and her bored pupils, the complacent Briton giving himself away at every turn to his French friend, and the prosaic and practical person, are all drawn from the quick. The orthodox verdict is "quite up to the average – such delightful puppies and kittens," while the rebellious pupil of the edifying Miss Pemmican remarks, "Bother the beastly old Academy. I wish it was burnt, I do!"

From the same hand, seventeen years later, comes an equally illuminating sketch of the visitors to the Grafton Galleries – art-student, precious young painter, young City man, high-brow critic, matter-of-fact lady, and the frank and immortal Philistine only moved to unseemly mirth when his friend remarks, "Drawing to the Synthesist is entirely unimportant in solving the problem how the artist may best express his own temperament." Punch often found himself driven into the ranks of the Philistines in self-defence; anyhow, he always preferred the way of Gath to that of gush. In "An Old Master's Growl" in 1895 the speaker declares that the mass of the people only enjoyed the annual summer show; the few who came to see the Old Masters mostly came to be seen. But the ancients were not annoyed, it was only what they expected: —

We expect it – I said just as much to Vandyck —There's but one in a hundred that comes who'll descryThe Beauty of Art. It's the sham I dislike:Well – good-bye!

Leighton and Millais

From the other end of the scale comes another "growl" in the same year – that of the professional model, in Phil May's picture, against Burne-Jones who had recently made a drawing of Labour for the Daily Chronicle: "I reckon 'e'll be on the pavement next." Personalities, rather than principles or theories, interested Punch at this period, and in 1896 and 1897 the circle of his eminent Victorian friends was reduced by the passing of three ornaments of British Art, all of them Academicians and two successively presidents of the Academy. Of the two sets of verses on Leighton, the second is much the better. Punch takes for his text Watts's saying that Leighton had painted many pictures, but that his life was nobler than them all: —

Noblesse oblige: his manners matched his art;Fine painter-skill, the bearing of a prince.

The writer alludes to the malignant disparagement indulged in by his detractors and sums up: —

Great if not quite among the greatest, hereA noble artist of a noble lifeRests with a fame that lives, and need not fearDetraction or the hour's ephemeral strife.

Leighton's generosity and munificence to brother artists deserved all and more than all that Punch said: his fame as an artist has hardly borne out the prediction of the last couplet. Sir John Millais, his successor, was linked by more intimate ties from the days of Once a Week. Du Maurier was one of his dearest friends, and Punch claimed to have been alone, save for the Spectator, in acclaiming the genius of his early work. As he happily says, "from P.R.B, to P.R.A. – that tale is worth the telling." Millais only lived a few months to enjoy his honour, and on his death in the summer of 1896 Punch dwelt on his triple endowment of health, heartiness and power, his entirely English spirit, his mastery as a painter, and his genius for friendship.

Sir John Gilbert, who died a year later, was an old comrade and contributor. He had designed the fourth wrapper in January, 1843 – Doyle's final design was not adopted till six years later – and contributed intermittently to Punch down to 1882. His robust and spirited talent as an illustrator is acknowledged in Punch's tribute: —

The faded history of courts and kingsTouched by your spell took on its former hue;You made the daily art of common thingsFresh as the morning dew.

A deeper note is sounded in Punch's salutation of Watts on his death in 1904, when he recognizes the fidelity of that illustrious artist to his conception of the high mission of Art and his well-known repudiation of the maxim "Art for Art's Sake": —

His means were servants to the end in viewAnd not the end's self; so his heart was wiseTo hold – as they have held, the chosen few —High failure dearer than the easy prize.Now lifted face to face with unseen things,Dimly imagined in the lower life,He sees his Hope renew her broken strings,And Love and Death no more at bitter strife.

Punch on Aubrey Beardsley

To retrace our steps to the 'nineties, it must be admitted that Punch enjoyed himself more in belabouring Beardsley than in saluting established reputations. Seeing nothing in his work but a wilful, exotic and decadent bizarrerie, Punch assailed him under various aliases, all of them grotesque and uncomplimentary. In 1893 the famous Beardsley "poster" for the Avenue Theatre inspired the lines headed "Ars Postera," which begin: —

Mr. Aubrey Beer de Beers,You're getting quite a high renown;Your Comedy of Leers, you know,Is posted all about the town;This sort of stuff I cannot puff,As Boston says, it makes me "tired":Your Japanee-Rossetti girlIs not a thing to be desired.Mr. Aubrey Beer de Beers,New English Art (excuse the chaff)Is like the Newest Humour style,It's not a thing at which to laugh:But all the same, you need not maimA beauty reared on Nature's rules;A simple maid au naturelIs worth a dozen spotted ghouls.

On being presented with artful and crafty puzzle by artistic friend. (Query – Is it the right way up? And, if so, what is it?)

Punch pursued his pet aversion from pillar to post – or poster – with caricatures of his types, compared to "Stygian Sphinxes, Chimæras in soot, problems in Euclid gone mad." Mr. Beardsley, however, was not the only emancipated artist who came under Punch's lash. In a notice of an Exhibition at the Dudley Gallery, Mr. Sickert's picture of "The Sisters Lloyd" prompts the comment, "To be more original than the originals is to paint the piccalilli and gild the refined ginger-bread." By 1901 Punch had become much impressed and exasperated by the modern cult of ugliness, and in 1902 began the first of a succession of travesties of modern impressionist art – "The Garden Party," "The Picnic," "A Dutch Landscape," in which all the negligible features are accentuated and the important ones left out. Another ingenious series belonging to the same year is that of illustrations of "Mary had a Little Lamb" in the style of Marcus Stone, Goodall, Clausen, Alma-Tadema, Dana Gibson, Albert Moore, John Collier, Briton Rivière, etc. These are executed in a spirit of friendly burlesque, very different from the notice of Mr. Gordon Craig's drawings, which is a masterpiece of adroit belittlement. "His drawing-power as an actor," we read, "is only equalled by his drawing-power as an artist"; and Punch kindly recommends him "to confine, or extend, his art almost entirely to designing nursery wall-papers."

The exuberances of "nouveau art" had already elicited the cry of the visitor (in Du Maurier's picture in 1894) on being shown round her friend's new house: "Oh, Liberty, how many crimes are committed in thy name!" – a joke repeated from an earlier volume.8 Nine years later the angularities of the new "Artful and Crafty" furniture are held up to well-merited ridicule. But it is only right to add that in 1897, in "The Pendulum of Taste" – an imaginative forecast of the sale of old furniture in the year 1996 —Punch indulges in a comprehensive and entirely damaging review of the monstrosities of Victorian furniture and decoration: groups of fruit in wax; hideous gaseliers; terrible chromolithographs; a tea-cosy embroidered with holly-berries in crewel work; a kneeling statuette of the infant Samuel; chairs and sofa in mahogany, upholstered in horsehair; a Kidderminster carpet "with a striking design of large nosegays on a ground of green moss"; and a complete set of antimacassars in wool and crochet. Mr. Galsworthy's minute description of the "Mausoleum," in which old Timothy Forsyte, the last and most long-lived of his generation, lived or rather vegetated down to and through the War, is much on the same lines. But Punch, being nearly twice as old as Mr. Galsworthy, had spent a good part of his life amid these surroundings.

Art Definitions

The principles and theory of art-criticism, as I have noted above, did not trouble Punch greatly in the first twelve or fifteen years of this period. He was mainly concerned with the robust expression of his likes and dislikes. But by 1908 he had become slightly infected by the new psychology of art, and by way of clarifying the atmosphere launched the following list of definitions: —

ART(A glossary for the opening of the R.A.)

An Artist is a person who paints what he thinks he sees.

An Amateur is a person who thinks he paints what he sees.

An Impressionist is a person who paints what other people think he sees.

A Popular Artist is a person who paints what other people think they see.

A Successful Artist is a person who paints what he thinks other people see.

A Great Artist is a person who paints what other people see they think.

A Failure is a person who sees what other people think they paint.

A Portraitist is a person who paints what other people don't think he sees.

A Landscape Painter is a person who doesn't paint what other people see.

A Realist is a person who sees what other people don't paint.

An Idealist is a person who paints what other people don't see.

The Hanging Committee are people who don't see what other people think they paint.

A Royal Academician is a person who doesn't think and paints what other people see.

A Genius is a person who doesn't see and paints what other people don't think.

A Critic is a person who doesn't paint and thinks what other people don't see.

The Public are people who don't see or think what other people don't paint.

A Dealer is a person that sees that people who paint don't think, and who thinks that people who don't paint don't see. He sees people who don't see people who paint; he thinks that people who paint don't see people who see; and he sees what people who don't paint think.

FINALLY

A Reader is a person whose head swims.

The art critics accredited to the daily Press, like their musical colleagues, could no longer be accused of lagging behind the modernist tendencies of the times: they aspired to be in the van of progress. In 1913 Punch burlesques the wonderful phraseology of The Times art critic in one of his "Studies of reviewers," which deals with the exhibitors at the Neo-British Art League. It may suffice to quote the appreciations of Mme. Strulda Brugh and Mr. Marcellus Thom. The method of the former, as illustrated by her "Pekinese Puppies," is contrasted with that of the Congestionist school in that she "deanthropomorphizes her scheme of pigmentation into nodules of aplanatic voluminosity": —

When therefore we have to assume a fluorescent reticulation of the interstitial sonorities, a situation is developed which might well baffle any but an advanced expert in transcendental mathematics. As a result the modelling of the puppies' tails is lacking in curvilinear conviction; their heads fail in canine suggestiveness, their fore-paws in prehensile subjectivity.