M. H. Spielmann

“ In looking at the literature of Punch, we become sensible of a change not dissimilar to that which we find to have taken place in its art. There is nowadays no Jerrold, whose fulminating passion and fine frenzy often came dangerously near to "high-falutin'." There is perhaps no versifier at the Table with quite the same fancy or taste as Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, Shirley Brooks, and Percival Leigh. But we have instead a keener observation of the life and customs of the day, an ingenuity and an elegance that go better with the taste and habit of thought of the times. ”

“ Punch sits, say those of a later day, there is the flow of wit and of laughter—there the fountain of that fun which has stamped his journal as representative of what is most characteristic and best in English humour—there the source of the art which has been the greatest school of wood-drawing and cutting, and of true caricature, that this country has ever seen. Good-nature is the quality rarest and most remarkable in a political and social journal. ”

“ Passing from these things to a more pleasing one, we are struck with Leech's exceptional love of beauty. Never did Nature seem more delightful than in his cuts—in those dainty backgrounds in which the loveliest scenery is so skilfully reproduced. "What plump young beauties," cries Thackeray, "those are with which Mr. Punch's chief contributor supplies the old gentleman's pictorial harem!" It is true, they are nearly always the same girl, this ideal of Punch's—short in stature, simple and pouting and laughing, with big eyes and rounded chin, with bewitching dimples and pretty ringlets ”

“ Above the head of every editor the law of libel hangs like the sword of Damocles. It is at all times difficult for a newspaper of any sort to avoid the infringement of its provisions, vigilant though the editor may be. But in the case of a confessedly "satirical" journal the danger is enormously increased, for the margin between "fair comment" and flat libel shrinks strangely when the raison d'étre of the criticism is pungency, and the object laughter.
That Punch has steered clear of giving serious offence, save on occasions extremely few, must be counted to him for righteousness. ”

“ From more, the quieter flow of genial humour. And among the rest, the listeners; men—some of them—who prefer to attend than to talk, even to the point of reserve and almost of taciturnity. Such men were John Leech, Richard Doyle, and Charles Keene—whose silence, however, masked subtle minds that were teeming with droll ideas, and as appreciative of humour as the sprightliest. What jokes have been made, what stories told that never have found their way into print! What chaff, what squibs, what caricatures—which it surpasses the wit of a Halsbury or a MacNeill to imagine or condone! ”

“ Jabez Hogg, "Landells and Henry Mayhew were certainly the founders"—the former conceiving the idea of the paper which was presently established, and the latter developing it, as set forth, according to his original views—founding the tradition and personality of "Mr. Punch," and converting him from a mere strolling puppet, an irresponsible jester, into the laughing philosopher and man of letters, the essence of all wit, the concentration of all wisdom, the soul of honour, the fountain of goodness, and the paragon of every virtue. ”

“ There are few vices so deeply resented as the telling of an old joke; in an editor it is recognised as amounting to crime. But those who judge so severely have clearly never made a scientific study of the Joke. It is not sufficient to analyse a witticism and dissect it, in the cold spirit of that terrible book called "A Theory of Wit and Humour," till its humour flies, like the delicate bouquet from uncorked wine. The genealogy of jokes and twists of humour and of thought, of form and application, must be traced ”

“ As for political opinions, I have none; at least, if I have my own little politics, I keep them to myself, and profess only those of my paper. If I have infused any dignity into cartoon-designing, that comes from no particular effort on my part, but solely from the high feeling I have for art. In any case, if I am a 'cartoonist'—the accepted term—I am not a caricaturist in any sense of the word. My drawings are sometimes grotesque, but that is from a sense of fun and humour. Some people declare that I am no humorist, that I have no sense of fun at all ”

“ In describing the Punch Dinner I show how the merry meeting lapses, by a natural transition, from pleasure to work, and ends with the evolution of the cartoon; how the mist of talk, vague perhaps and undecided at first, slowly develops a bright nebulous point, round which the discussion revolves and revolves, until at last it takes form, slowly and carefully, though changed a dozen times, and finally, after being threshed and threshed again, stands in the ultimate form in which next week it meets the public eye. ”

“ For not only was it all focussed upon one man, but in his case there was a great personal triumph, a national recognition of a great work and of a splendid career, and in the eyes of the world the justification of that mighty art of black-and-white, which through the printing-press is a greater vital force than any other existing form of art—though despised till now in all official quarters—the art by which Punch rose to his pinnacle of greatness. ”

“ Clubs there were not a few about Fleet Street and the Strand, where the men who founded Punch, and their friends and enemies alike in similar walks of life, would hob-nob together, and where the sharp concussions of their diamond-cut-diamond wit would emit the sparks and flashes that were remembered and straightway converted into "copy." In those early days the flow of soul was closely regulated by the flow of liquor, and the most modest of Dinners was food at once to body and to mind. ”

“ We now come to the last great lesson of our motley teacher—the gallows; that accursed tree which has its root in injuries. How clearly Punch exposes the fallacy of that dreadful law which authorises the destruction of life! Punch sometimes destroys the hangman, and why not? Where is the divine injunction against the shedder of man's blood to rest? None can answer! To us there is but One disposer of life. At other times Punch hangs the devil: this is as it should be. ”

“ The "movements" and the "isms" and the creations of fashion, of nearly all of which we have a whole series spread over a long, but none too long a time, reflect in themselves alone the social history of our day—development of intellect and its antithesis, fashion in dress and language, art and literature, craze and affectation; in short, the whole national evolution during a quarter of a century. It is amusing to glance at some of them—a few out of the very many—and sample the journalistic wit with which Leech eyed and illustrated the passing hour. ”

“ Yet moustache, beard, and whiskers have been a mine of fun to Leech—from the little Eton boy who tells the hairdresser, when he has cut his curls, just to give him a close shave, and who ties the major's whisker to his sister's ringlet; to the snobs who, "giving to hairy nothings a local habitation and a name," flatter themselves that their stubbly chins will get them mistaken for "captings" at the very least; and to the military Adonises who may boast that their silken beards and fierce moustaches lead a beauty by each single hair. ”

“ Punch, when the squire, the colonel, and the admiral are to be at once expressed, together with all that they legislate or fight for, in the symbolic figure of the nation, to present the incarnate Mr. Bull always as a farmer—never as a manufacturer or shopkeeper—and to conceive and exhibit him rather as paymaster for the faults of his neighbours than as watching for opportunity of gain out of their follies? ”

“ Through this truth we may see how Punch has so continually dealt with vulgarity without being vulgar; while many of his so-called rivals, touching the self-same subjects, have so tainted themselves as to render them fitter for the kitchen than the drawing-room, through lack of this saving grace. Fun may have been in their jokes, but not true humour. Punch thus became to London much what the Old Comedy was to Athens ”

“ From that day onwards the great occasions of a people's loss—either of our own mourning or of our sympathy with that of others—have been touched with a dignity and grace in accord with their lofty and solemn purpose, in drawings which have rarely failed to touch a responsive chord in the people's heart, and which, judged as compositions, have often marked the highest point to which Sir John Tenniel's art has reached. ”

“ They worthily heralded the novelist as we know him now, who is also the author of one of the most brilliant lectures—brimming over with happy thought and sparkling epigram—that have been composed in recent years. It is by his long, varied, and effective service that Mr. du Maurier has to be recognised as one of the four artists—Leech, Keene, and Tenniel being the others—who bore the chief share in raising Punch to his pinnacle, and he is to be named with Keene as a truthful recorder of the life and humours of Society during the last forty years of the nineteenth century. ”

“ There is no doubt that the "little wine" that so stimulated him to witty and brilliant conversation full of flash and repartee, sometimes turned sour upon his lips, and changed the kindness that was in his heart into a semblance of gall. Mr. Sidney Cooper has gravely set it on record how on leaving the Punch Dinner Jerrold would tie a label with his name and address upon it round his neck, so that, should he in his homeward course be tempted to stray into the path of undue conviviality, he might sooner or later be safely delivered at his destination. ”

“ In its artistic aspect, at least, Punch is more than a comic journal: it is, and has been for more than half a century, a school of wood-drawing, of pen and pencil draughtsmanship, and of wood-cutting of the first rank; it is a school of art in itself. ”

“ To Leech it was as his own death-knell; and when he, Mark Lemon, Shirley Brooks, Tom Taylor, Horace Mayhew, "Jacob Omnium," and John Tenniel stood round his grave, they felt, I have been told, as if the glory of Punch had been irremediably dimmed. No verses ever penned by Punch's poets to the memory of one of their dead brethren ever breathed more love or more beauty of thought than those in which Thackeray was mourned, and defended against the charge of cynicism—" ... a brave, true, honest gentleman, whom no pen but his own could depict as those who knew him could desire" ”

“ There is always something of the caricaturist in his most serious and important sketches—most of all, perhaps, in his etchings. It is in his smallest cuts that he is seen to the best advantage, and in them he occasionally challenges comparison with Doyle and Leech himself.
In the execution of his Punch sketches, in nearly all the three hundred and eighty of them, Thackeray was as summary as in the turning of a ballad, and I describe elsewhere how he would make a drawing on the wood while the engraver waited and chatted over a cigar. ”

“ A joke may be only a joke—or a comedy, or a tragedy; but the greatest caricature (which need by no means display the greatest art) is necessarily that which goes straightest to the heart and mind. No drawing is true caricature which does not make the beholder think, whether it springs simply from good-humour or has its source in the passion of contempt, hatred, or revenge, of hope or despair. Mere amusement, said Swift, "is the happiness of those who cannot think," while Humour, to quote Carlyle again, "is properly the exponent of low things ”

“ Jerrold, as a wasp, is gazing ruefully at the bâton which has dropped from Punch's feeble hands; and Mark Lemon, dressed as a pot-boy, is straining himself in the foreground to reach his pewter-pot. Around float many of Punch's butts, political and social. Wellington on the left and Brougham on the right play cup-and-ball with him. Louis Philippe has him on a toasting-fork, and Lord John Russell hangs him on a gallows-tree. Palmerston, Prince de Joinville, Jullien, Sibthorpe, Moses the tailor, Buckingham, and many more besides, are to be recognised. ”

“ While Society, whose every phase he has illustrated with a truth, a grace, and a tenderness heretofore unknown to satiric art, gladly and proudly takes charge of his fame, they, whose pride in the genius of a great associate was equalled by their affection for an attached friend, would leave on record that they have known no kindlier, more refined, or more generous nature than that of him who has been thus early called to his rest. ”

“ Young men are arising who are capable of carrying on its traditions and of bearing its banner bravely and merrily aloft; and it may safely be assumed that, just as the Royal Academy sooner or later absorbs the best Outsiders to adorn its circle and keep its vigour green, so Punch will never lack the ablest men to don his cap and motley and shake his jingling bells. ”