Charles L. Graves

“ 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 ”

“ Scene—Mud-Salad Market
Duke of Mudford: "Sweet pretty place, ain't it?"
Mr. P. (Inspector of Nuisances) : "No, my Lord Duke, it isn't pretty, and it isn't sweet! Here, take this broom, and make a clean sweep of it!"
It is not too much to say that Mud-Salad Market is a disgrace to London, a special disgrace to his Grace of Mudford, and about the greatest nuisance ever permitted in a great City of Nuisances. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Men and women and girls, they wore the set look of people who had espoused an unpopular and even perilous cause and were resolved to carry it through. They seldom looked happy, and they had little cause for it. In ten years the physiognomy of the Salvationists had changed, and they went about their work unmolested with serene and cheerful faces. Punch could at least plead this extenuation of his hostility, that it was shared by learned and excellent men. ”

“ Do you think that your thorough knowledge of English history, your acquaintance with the working of the Poor Laws, your grasp of the progress of European Art, and your general familiarity with all the great political, commercial, engineering, economic and other problems of the hour are such as to warrant you in facing the coming ordeal with a jaunty confidence? ”

“ You may start from Cabbage-leaf corner, near the site of Temple Bar, on a market-morning, and may go as far as Turnip-top Square in Bloomsbury, or Cauliflower-place at Charing Cross, and it is all Mud-Salad Market. Houses are barricaded with mountainous carts of green-stuff, cabs lose themselves in vain attempts to drive through the maze of vegetables, the costermonger makes temporary gardens on the pathway, while the roads are blocked with waggons, carts, donkey-trucks, and porters staggering under the weight of huge baskets. ”

“ 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. ”

“ John Bright's secession from the Gladstonian Liberals had been a serious blow, and his contributions to the Unionist armoury were so vigorous and pointed, that it is rather strange to find Punch assailing him in March, 1887, for his pacificist tendencies:—
The white flag, John, may bid all battle cease,
Not the white feather! In defence of right,
Despite your dogmas, men perforce must fight
With swords as well as words: be it their care
With either, to heed honour, and fight fair. ”

“ 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 [Pg 242] 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." ”

“ Habits of strict discipline, cleanliness, and domestic thrift are inculcated; the little children, from the biggest down to "the Widow's Mites" engaged in a Pantomime, are seldom sick, and never sorry, but do their work with pleasure, and would probably be willing to undertake even "more study," rather than be deprived of their theatrical employment which brings in the money, pays the school, and helps to keep a happy family together under one roof, which, "be it never so 'umble," is styled by that dear old English word "home"—and there is no place like it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the earlier volumes of this survey it has been shown how deep-seated was the prejudice against the Army amongst respectable middle-class and working people. In his earlier and anti-militarist days Punch had shared this feeling, and even denounced the recruiting-sergeant as an ogre or worse. From the Crimean War onward this hostility gave place to the wiser and saner view that the men who served their country bravely and faithfully should be decently treated, properly fed, and encouraged in self-respect by the community which they defended. ”

“ Yet in the autumn of 1885, when Lord Carnarvon was Viceroy, Punch developed a strong distrust of the conciliatory policy of the Conservatives. In one cartoon he shows Captain Moonlight masked and armed at an open door, the bar of the Crimes Act having been removed. In October he wrote, "when Tyranny alone is free where is the safety—save for slaves." In another cartoon he showed the National League as the Irish Vampire, hovering over Hibernia in her uneasy sleep, and bade her awake and banish the hideous monster that was sapping her strength. ”

“ The treatment of foreigners had provoked a collective protest, from which Russia abstained. So when John Bull, as a sailor, asks Russia to take a hand in controlling the Chinese Dragon, Russia replies: "Well, I don't know—you see, he's a sort of relation of mine!"
The admiration which Punch had so often if reluctantly expressed for Bismarck in office yielded to something like disgust at his undignified bitterness in retirement, above all at his use of the "reptile press" as a means of attacking the Imperial policy and Caprivi, his successor as Chancellor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ MEN AND MASTERS: WORK AND WAGES
In the preceding volume I endeavoured to trace and account for the waning of Punch's reforming zeal and democratic ardour, and to illustrate his gradual movement from Left to Right Centre in the 'fifties, 'sixties, and early 'seventies. Many abuses had been remedied, the barriers of class privilege had been broken down, the cleavage between the "Two Nations" was less glaring, national prosperity had increased, the ladder of learning had been set up by Forster's Education Act. ”

“ If Punch was more mistrustful of Trade Unionism, he was at least as unsparing as in his early days in pillorying examples of the greed and tyranny of masters and employers who misused their opportunities of exploiting unorganized or partially organized labour. ”

“ At the close of the same month Punch addresses a versified remonstrance to the miners. He admits that pay should be liberal for dangerous underground work, but deprecates the use of the strike weapon as ruinous to trade and other industries by the laying up of ships and the closing of factories and railways. So, just two years later, in a cartoon on "Going on Play," he condemns the miners' strike, which aimed openly at creating an artificial scarcity, and thereby kept up wages. A poor clerk is seen expostulating with a working man: "It's all very well, but what's play to you is death to us." ”

“ A military offence, simply capital, becomes a minor offence when treasonable besides. Treason is an extenuating circumstance of mutiny and murder, and its commission in committing those crimes reduces murderers and mutineers to political offenders. Therefore, instead of being hanged or shot, they ought, if punished at all, and not, on the contrary, rewarded, to be condemned to nothing worse than temporary seclusion, and should, all of them, after a merely nominal imprisonment, be respectfully released. ”

“ Philanthropy is continually actively busying itself about the education of the young—here is something practical for it to do—let it look to the quality of its Magazine literature. It wants some energy and some capital, but both in these days ought to be forthcoming. To drive the penny dreadful out of the literary field is not a task beyond the powers of organization and enterprise. ”

“ Power which buys it immediately utilizes it against us. Another Fleet has to be ordered at once at fancy prices in response to Press clamour. Scuttle Party, in cleft stick, halts between two opinions; in pursuit of peace is found fighting all over the world, and after frantic efforts at economy, runs up Income-tax to six shillings in the pound. John Bull turns out Scuttle Party.
Then we jump to A.D. 2000, but even then the wildest stretch of Punch's imagination does not exceed the establishment of conscription and the raising of the Army to a million men. ”

“ Our prophetic instinct enables us to foresee that the British Aristocracy of the future will consist of two distinct parties—not the Tories and the Whigs—but the handsome people and the clever people. The former will be the highly developed descendants of the athletes and the beauties, the splendid cricketers and lawn tennis players of our day. The latter will be the offspring, not of modern æsthetes—oh, dear, no! but of a tougher and more prolific race, one that hasteth not, nor resteth ”

“ Tearing ahead with the green sea sweeping the decks from end to end, never slacking speed in the face of the heaviest weather, regardless alike of the risk of crashing into some coming vessel and of the chance of splitting in half on some suddenly appearing iceberg, as of the dense fog which conceals both; with fires blazing and stokers fainting over the stress of work that is wrung out of them—the passage is made, from start to finish, at high-pressure pace. ”

“ This comparatively friendly mood soon gave way to the old distrust, and by October, in "Swag, or the political Jack Sheppard," we see Lord Randolph, anxious to eclipse Dizzy as a Tory Turpin and "disher" of the Whigs, rifling a chest labelled "Liberal Measures," while Mr. Gladstone peers into the room at the back. Punch's distrust was partly justified by Lord Randolph's impetuous resignation in December. What might have been a great career was wrecked by an impatient temper. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ In February Punch demands instant action. An angry John Bull bids Gladstone unmuzzle the British Lion at once, and Punch comments severely on the Premier's word-jugglery and sophistry. Later on we see Gladstone in the desert "after the Simoom," leading a camel. "Mirage" shows Gordon looking anxiously for relief from the battlements of Khartoum. A burlesque correspondence between a British Hero and the British Government pours satire on the cheap sympathy and lax opportunism of the Government, who are only concerned with saving their skin and their faces. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”