Part 19

A "busby" toque extinguishing the hair, As if a giant hand had crushed it there-- Behold the latest mode! and write beneath, "A winter blossom bursting from its 'sheath.'"

[Illustration: A DECADE'S PROGRESS

I. Mrs. Browne, Mrs. Browne, junior, and Mrs. Browne, junior's little girl, as they were in 1901, and--

II. As they are to-day.]

[Illustration: AS WE KNEW HER TEN YEARS AGO--AS WE MEET HER TO-DAY]

[Sidenote: _Fashion Plate Heroines_]

Miss Maud Allan had not yet been ousted from her eminence by the Russian Ballet and by real dancing, and the repercussion of the cult of the "all-but-altogether" on fashionable costume is well satirized by _Punch_ in this year. By reducing materials to an irreducible minimum this new mania, as _Punch_ logically argues, was likely to be ruinous to trade as well as to railway porters and carriers, since large trunks were no longer necessary and a whole wardrobe could be carried in a handbag or suitcase. Another view of the situation is expressed in the comment of the wife of the frugal Scot who had protested against the idea of her taking to this "awfu' gear": "Hoots, mon! Dinna ye see it's just made wi' aboot hauf the material." Conflicting tendencies can always be simultaneously illustrated in the vagaries of feminine fashion, for along with this alarming "skimpiness" went the cult of huge fur head-dresses and muffs with animals' muzzles thereon. In the lines quoted above the arrival of the "hobble" or "harem" skirt is foreshadowed. In 1910 this strange Oriental monstrosity is ridiculed in the picture of the girl hopping to catch her train, as running was out of the question, and again in the comment of the navvy who feels that _he_ is at last in the fashion with his knee-straps.

[Illustration: THE SPARTAN MOTHER]

[Sidenote: _The Perversities of Mode_]

The progress of fashion in the decade 1901-1911 is well illustrated in the parallel groups given in the latter year and showing the change from homely comfort to aggressive scantiness. Even better is the admirable representation--it is hardly a caricature--of the old and new types of fashion plate; the former insipid and simpering lay figures, the latter sinister modern Messalinas. Beyond an increasing tendency to extravagance and eccentricity and the general use of paint there is little to note in the remaining years of this period. The brief reign of the "pannier" skirt impelled _Punch_, under the heading of "Pockets at last," to indicate how use might here be combined with so-called ornament. The big-hat craze continued; the habit of poking the head forward--noted in the verses on the "Directoire" style--became so pronounced that "backbones were out of fashion" and an erect deportment made a woman "look all wrong"; while the inconsistent perversity of winter fashions is satirized in the lady with her bodice slit down to the diaphragm walking with a gentleman in a heavy overcoat and a thick muffler; and again in the "Spartan mother," swathed in furs, accompanied by her hatless, bare-legged children. Lastly, on the very eve of the War, _Punch_ gives a pictorial table of the relative importance of the persons engaged in the production of a revue. The costumier heads the list: at the other end are the composer and a group of authors.

LETTERS AND JOURNALISM

In letters, as in life, the passing of "the old order" was already apparent at the opening of the period under review in this volume. For in 1892 the author of the lines immortally associated with the phrase himself passed away, full of years and honours. _Punch_ had always been a Tennysonian, even in the days when the Laureate was still looked upon as an innovator. He had given Tennyson the hospitality of his columns in 1846 to retort on Bulwer Lytton, who had attacked "School-miss Alfred" in _The New Timon_. Finally, when Tennyson was laid to rest in the Abbey, _Punch_ saluted him without reserve as the chief glory of Victorian minstrelsy. The memorial verses are too long to quote, for _Punch_ in his elegiac moods was still inclined to prolixity, but they deal adequately with the spirit and influence, the consummate art, and the fervent patriotism of one who, after various fluctuations of prestige, is even now being re-discovered by Georgian critics.

The vacant laureateship was not filled till the close of 1895, when the appointment of Mr. Alfred Austin by Lord Salisbury unloosed a flood of ridicule. In the cartoon "Alfred the Little" _Punch_ depicted a diminutive figure, standing on tip-toe, as he hangs his lyre on the walls of the Temple of the Muses. The laurelled bust of Tennyson is shown in the interior, while outside the figures of Sir Edwin Arnold and Sir Lewis Morris are seen dissembling their disappointment. A few weeks later the inclusion of the new Laureate amongst the celebrities of Madame Tussaud's Exhibition prompted the malicious soliloquy of "Alfred amongst the Immortals."

[Sidenote: _Swinburne and the British Academy_]

Mr. Austin's unfortunate efforts at the time of the Boer war did not escape _Punch's_ derision, and when his name failed to appear in the New Year's Honour List of 1901, _Punch_, in a sardonic parody, modelled on the famous lyric in _Atalanta in Calydon_, represented Swinburne ironically asking:--

Austin--what of the Knight, Heavy with hope deferred? When will he solace our sight, Panoplied, plumed and spurred?

Swinburne and Meredith, two other "eminent Victorians," both died in 1909. Towards them _Punch's_ attitude had undergone considerable vicissitudes. Swinburne's erotic ballads had, as I have noticed in an earlier volume, excited _Punch's_ vehement disapproval. Yet he paid him the tribute of constant imitation and parody. When the proposal for establishing a British Academy was brought forward in 1897, _Punch_, who "crabbed" the scheme from the outset, was not content with printing imaginary letters from various aspirants--Hall Caine, Miss Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, William Watson, "Sarah Grand," and Clement Scott--but made good play with Swinburne's publicly avowed disgust at having his name associated with a "_colluvies litterarum_" and a "ridiculous monster." The exclusion of pure or creative literature from the British Academy, it may be added, prompted Sambourne's cartoon in 1902 in which a sour-visaged lady in academical costume is seen mounting the steps to the Academy, while three graceful figures--Drama, Romance, and Poetry--are locked out on the other side of the railings.

To return to Swinburne, it should be noted that probably more poems were written in the "Dolores" stanza throughout this period than in any other metre. And when he died in 1909, _Punch_, granting him full amnesty for his violence in controversy, his extravagance and lawlessness of spirit, forgot the rebel and only remembered the singer:--

What of the night? For now his day is done, And he, the herald of the red sunrise, Leaves us in shadow even as when the sun Sinks from the sombre skies.

High peer of Shelley, with the chosen few He shared the secrets of Apollo's lyre, Nor less from Dionysian altars drew The god's authentic fire.

Last of our land's great singers, dowered at birth With music's passion, swift and sweet and strong, Who taught in heavenly numbers, new to earth, The wizardry of song--

His spirit, fashioned after Freedom's mould, Impatient of the bonds that mortals bear, Achieves a franchise large and uncontrolled, Rapt through the void of air.

"What of the night?" For him no night can be; The night is ours, left songless and forlorn; Yet o'er the darkness, where he wanders free, Behold, a star is born!

George Meredith was an old friend of _Punch's_ from the days when he contributed to _Once a Week_, but he was not exempt from criticism on that account, as I have already shown. In 1894 he was again burlesqued in a parody of _Lord Ormont and his Aminta_, which ran through three numbers and was decorated with a portrait of the author as a bull in the china shop of syntax, grammar and form. _Punch_ in middle age only dimly appreciated Meredith's genius, and was disconcerted by his obscurity. _Punch_ erred in good company, for Tennyson is reported to have said that "reading Meredith is like wading through glue"; but sixteen years later the mists cleared away, and the verses of May, 1909, reveal insight as well as admiration:--

Masked in the beauty of the May-dawn's birth, Death came and kissed the brow still nobly fair, And hushed that heart of youth for which the earth Still kept its morning air.

Long time initiate in her lovely lore, Now is he one with Nature's woods and streams, Whereof, a Paradisal robe, he wore The visionary gleams.

* * * * *

When from his lips immortal music broke, It was the myriad voice of vale and hill; "The lark ascending" poured a song that woke An echo sweeter still.

Yet most we mourn his loss as one who gave The gift of laughter and the boon of tears, Interpreter of life, its gay and grave, Its human hopes and fears.

Seer of the soul of things, inspired to know Man's heart and woman's, over all he threw The spell of fancy's iridescent glow, The sheen of sunlit dew.

And of the fellowship of that great Age For whose return our eyes have waited long, None left so rich a twofold heritage Of high romance and song.

[Sidenote: "_Eminent Victorians_"]

Nor did _Punch_ allow the minor Victorian poets and authors to pass without homage, witness his tributes to Coventry Patmore, the "poet of Home and High Faith," and Jean Ingelow, whose _High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire_ is one of the finest of modern ballads, besides touching the high-water mark of her achievement. Professor Henry Morley, who died in 1894, elicited the well-earned tribute, "He made good letters cheap"; while the heroic industry and distinguished talent of Mrs. Oliphant--for _The Beleaguered City_ comes very near to greatness--are fittingly acknowledged in _Punch's "Vale!"_ in 1897. Sir Theodore Martin, as the joint author of the immortal _Bon Gaultier Ballads_, had a special claim to grateful remembrance from one who, like him, had known Astley's Circus in the palmy days of Widdecomb and Gomersal:--

Comrade of our "roaring 'forties," in your pages still From the midmost fount of laughter may we drink our fill; Watch you, Rabelais' disciple, sunshine in your eyes, Shooting with an aim unerring folly as it flies.

_Punch's_ loyalty to Thomas Hood was testified in a long and perfectly serious study, in three instalments, of Hood as a poet and satirist, which appeared in 1896. In 1899 he was moved to sing the praises of Marryat in the manner of Gilbert's _Captain Reece_; in 1900 he reiterated his fealty to Walter Scott in verse as unimpeachable in sentiment as it was undistinguished in execution. I think one may safely say that nothing so inadequate to the occasion has since appeared in the pages of _Punch_. But even when the literary quality of _Punch_ was at its lowest he was capable of welcome surprises, as for example in the really charming verses, in 1893, on Izaak Walton's Tercentenary--verses based on intimate and affectionate study of _The Compleat Angler_.

Another Tercentenary, that of Milton in 1908, prompted the cartoon in which Shakespeare congratulates his brother poet because every three hundred years they gave _him_ a banquet at the Mansion House, while they only talked about a National Theatre for himself. A Chicago professor had seized the occasion to observe that Milton, if alive then, would be in favour of every advanced movement except Woman's Suffrage, and _Punch_ turned the saying to good account in a mock-heroic sonnet after Wordsworth. One might well have thought that Charles Lamb's reputation was securely established by 1913, yet in that year a member of the London Education Committee suggested that the _Essays of Elia_ was hardly the kind of book to be put in the hands of young women students. _Punch_ dealt judicially with the offender in two letters--one from a prudish parent; the other from a humanist and lover of Lamb who sends a copy of the incriminated volume to his daughter, together with a report of the protest, and some comments on the survival of Podsnap:--

He lives, he lives though sorely spent; We shrug our shoulders, and lament The tyranny not overpast Of Philistine and agelast.

[Illustration: SHACON AND BAKESPEARE

HOMER: "Look here, what _does_ it matter which of you chaps wrote the other fellow's books? Goodness only knows _how_ many wrote mine!"

(_Nods, as usual, and exit._) ]

[Sidenote: _Shakespeare and Shaw_]

The last word has an academic ring, but _Punch_ was probably thinking of George Meredith's use of it in a letter to _The Times_ in 1877 when he spoke of those "whom Rabelais would have called agelasts or non-laughers."

A brilliant American essayist, Miss Agnes Repplier, has recently remarked that the Twentieth Century does not "lean to extravagant

## partialities" but rather to "disparagement, to searchlights, to that

lavish candour which no man's reputation can sustain." In the pastime of hauling eminence down from its pinnacle she awards a pre-eminence to British critics. It cannot be said that _Punch_ has taken an

## active hand in this game. Even Shakespeare had not been exempt from

this "lavish candour." Mr. Bernard Shaw, writing in the _Saturday Review_ in 1896, had said that "with the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare, when I measure my mind against his." Whether he really meant what he said is a question passing the wit of the plain person; but the utterance stung _Punch_ into a rejoinder in the form of an imaginary interview with "G. B. S.," in which the criticism is further developed and obliquely ridiculed. _Punch_ was equally sensitive where patronage of the bard suggested self-advertisement, and in 1901, in the "New Genius of Stratford-on-Avon," he expressed an ironical apprehension lest Miss Corelli might oust Shakespeare as the tutelary deity of that town. The Bacon-Shakespeare controversy was again becoming acute and claimed _Punch's_ attention in 1902, when he published a cartoon bearing on the issue, and followed it up with a happy burlesque. As he argued, "If Bacon wrote Shakespeare's Plays, why, in the name of all that is biliteral, should not Shakespeare have written Bacon's Essays?" Hence the dissertation "Of Plays and their Authors," from which I may quote the concluding passages:--

It may be said of such an one that he is a man unlettered, having little Latin and of Greek no whit. How should he write plays? Whence hath he lore of law and medicine, of history and science? But there be handbooks. And a man may learn by enquiry of another, giving to him the price of half-a-pint. So shall the dramatist acquire such matters as be necessary, as the names of battles and of Kings and an imperfect understanding of legal phrases. Moreover, where no copyright is, he may steal freely from others, appropriating their plots and embellishing them.... Lastly to conclude this part, he that writeth dramas must endure with philosophy the investigations of talented ladies. Being of humble estate he must not murmur should his works be taken from him and given to a Lord Chancellor. Being himself sane he must bear with the lunatick fancies of others. And though his words be twisted into crazy anagrams, and his dramas be made a source of a scandal about Queen Elizabeth, he must not complain. Generally let the wise man ignore the bee that buzzeth in another's bonnet.

_Punch's_ "Essay" is not without relevance in its bearing on the recent "invention" of that highly "talented lady" Miss Clemence Dane.

[Sidenote: _Punch on "R. L. S."_]

To repeat what I said in another volume, the highest qualities of the literary critic are revealed, not in his loyalty to established reputations so much as in his attitude to contemporary writers, in his ability to gauge the durability of their merits, and to distinguish a passing vogue from a sure title to remembrance. And there was certainly no lack of material on which to exercise these faculties in the 'nineties--romantic, realistic, and decadent. _Punch_ had already welcomed Mr. Kipling and Sir James Barrie, and though his appreciation of the former varied considerably in the next fifteen years, admiration of his freshness and invention prevailed on the whole over distaste for his excursions into politics, his addiction to technicalities, slang and obscurity. The literary criticism of _Punch_ was probably at its lowest ebb in 1893, when a review of Stevenson's _Catriona_ is bracketed with a notice of Miss Corelli's _Barabbas_. Punch deals faithfully with the method of handling Holy Writ adopted in _Barabbas_, but contents himself with recommending _Catriona_ to those who love Scots dialect, which he frankly confesses he does not.

When Stevenson died in his early prime in 1894, a very different temper inspired _Punch's_ tribute to the Great Romancer:--

The lighthouse-builder raised no light That shall outshine the flame Of genius in its mellowest might, That beacons him to fame. And Pala's peak shall do yet more Than the great light at Skerryvore To magnify his name, Who mourned, when stricken flesh would tire, That he was weaker than his sire.

Teller of Tales! Of tales so told That all the world must list: Story sheer witchery, style pure gold, Yet with that tricksy twist Of Puck-like mockery which betrays The wanderer in this world's mad maze, Not blindly optimist, Who wooes Romance, yet sadly knows That Life's sole growth is not the Rose.

So when in 1901 the late Mr. W. E. Henley published his famous disparagement of the official life of Stevenson, _Punch_, in an address to the "Beloved Shade" of R. L. S., uttered an indignant protest against the attack on his memory.

_Punch_ enthusiastically greeted the Ruritanian romances of "Anthony Hope" as an antidote to the ultra-realistic novel, and Mr. Kipling's _Jungle Book_ was welcomed in 1894 with a salvo of puns on the Kip-lingo of the Laureate of the Jingle-Jungle, the Bard of the Bandar-log. In 1895 _The Men that Fought at Minden_ is described as "perhaps the most coarse and unattractive specimen of verse that this great young man has yet put forth--a jumble of words without a trace of swing or music. All this Tommy Atkins business is about played out." In 1898, in the series of "Letters to the Celebrated," "The Vagrant," while deprecating the "orgy of Imperialism" which Mr. Kipling had helped to foster, frankly admitted that he was largely responsible for "a quickened sense of the greatness of our mother-land, and a new sympathy for those who fight our battles"; and predicted that his greatest and most enduring title to fame would rest on his verse. In 1899 Mr. Kipling is rebuked for his glorification of machinery--he is called "the Polytechnic Poet"--slang and militarism, while the parody of _Stalky and Co._ is distinctly hostile to what Punch evidently considered an ignoble travesty of Public School traditions. Punch had himself repeatedly assailed the fetish-worship of Athletics, but Mr. Kipling's _Island Race_--with its bitter reference to those who

contented their souls With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals--

was more than he could endure. Accordingly his representative conducted an imaginary interview with "The Director-General of the Empire," who had added some fresh lines in violent and obscure abuse of rowing-men, and who explained that he never played games himself, but "spent all his spare time loafing and scoring off masters"--a further hit at _Stalky_. This mood of resentment had entirely passed by 1907, when _Punch_ depicted Mr. Kipling as "A Verry Parfit Nobel Knight"--on the occasion of his being awarded the Nobel Prize--and in 1910 the perusal of _Rewards and Fairies_ is compared to reading English history by the light of a Will-o'-the-Wisp.

The reviewer notes defects in style and lucidity, but ends on a note of whole-hearted admiration:--

When one considers the quality of Mr. Kipling's invention, the piety of his patriotism, the freshness and vigour of his style, and his astounding understanding of men and movements, why, one forgets all about these little trifling defects and again murmurs, "Wizard."

[Sidenote: _The Yellow Book_]

To return to the early 'nineties, _Punch_ saw no virtue, artistic or otherwise, in the movement towards unrestrained self-expression in _belles lettres_ which had its outcome in the _Yellow Book_ and the _Savoy_, its headquarters at "The Bodley Head," and whose chief hierophants were the avowed disciples of Baudelaire and Verlaine. To _Punch_ the movement was wholly decadent. In the verses "Tell it not in Gath," in 1894, after denouncing "flowers of evil," and the practice of delving in the drains and dustbins of humanity, the writer declares he would far rather remain a Philistine than achieve enlightenment by such unsavoury means. In the same vein he addresses "Any Boy-poet of the Decadence":--

For your dull little vices we don't care a fig, It is _this_ that we deeply deplore: You were cast for a common or usual pig, But you play the invincible bore.

As in his earlier tirades against the Æsthetes, _Punch_ confounded all the contributors to the _Yellow Book_ and the _Savoy_ in one common anathema. The former, with an illustration by "Daubaway Weirdsley," and "Max" as "Max Mereboom," himself one of the finest literary parodists of our time, is held up in 1895 to especial ridicule. The _Savoy_ in 1896 becomes "The Saveloy," with imaginary extracts and further attacks on Max Mereboom, Simple Symons, and Weirdsley; while in the same year in "The Chaunt of the Bodley Head" (after Praed's _Chaunt of the Brazen Head_) the Savoy School is condemned for its mephitic atmosphere. There was in the movement much deliberate eccentricity, much of the cant of anti-cant, which clamoured for robust satire, but _Punch_ was more happily inspired in his ridicule of the popular and society novels of the time--in his parody of _Sherlock Holmes_, which was quite good enough for the original, and of Dodo, in which the rowdiness and pseudo-intellectuality of Mr. Benson's heroine are excellently hit off. It opens well with "'Sling me over a two-eyed steak, Bill,'" said Bobo." In the sequel the Marquis of Cokaleek, the noble unappreciated husband, gets killed in the hunting field, but Bobo does not marry Bill, her fancy man. She jilts him and "got herself married to an Austrian Prince at half an hour's notice by the A. of C." _Punch_, let it be recorded, was responsible for the often quoted saying which appeared in 1894 that "the modern novel is a blend of the Erotic, the Neurotic and the Tommyrotic."

_Esther Waters_, compared and contrasted with Hardy's _Tess_, is pronounced in 1894 to be _not_ "_virginibus puerisque_," and a once famous "emancipation novel," _The Yellow Aster_, by "Iota," long since hopelessly out-distanced in the reaction against reticence, becomes _The Yellow Plaster_, by "Iõpna," whose "She-notes" wild are amusingly travestied in the same year. _The Yellow Aster_ and _Key-Notes_ were pioneer efforts in the domain of the psychological novel, and the new jargon is ridiculed in such burlesque phrases as "the woman's voice came through the envelope of Margerine's subconsciousness, steely clear as a cheese-cutter." The vogue of _The Green Carnation_, a _roman à clef_ which created some stir at the same time, is attested in Du Maurier's picture "How Opinion is Formed":--

HE: "Have you read that beastly book _The Mauve Peony_ by Lady Middlesex?"

SHE: "Yes, I rather liked it."

HE: "So did I."

[Sidenote: _Unchristian Criticism of Hall Caine_]