IXMR. PUNCH TAKES THE WRONG TURNING
There are those who gibe atPunch. There are also those who gibe at those who gibe atPunch. The match is a fairly even one.Punchis undoubtedly not as good as it used to be, but it is not quite so certain that it is not as clever as it used to be. Very few people realise thatPunchwas once a good paper—that it was a good paper, I mean in the Charles-Kingsley sense of the adjective. It began in 1841, as Mr. C. L. Graves prettily says, by “being violently and vituperatively on the side of the angels.” IfPunchhad kept pace with the times it would, in these days, at the age of eighty, be suspected of Socialism. Its championship of the poor against those who prospered on the poverty of the poor was as vehement as a Labour speech at a street-corner. One of the features of the earlyPunchwas a “Pauper’s Corner,” in which “the cry of the people found frequent and touching utterance.”It was in the Christmas number ofPunchin 1843 that Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” was first published. Mark Lemon, the editor, insisted on publishing it, though all his colleagues were opposed to him on the point. In the following years we find the same indignant sense of realities expressing itself in Leech’s cartoon, “The Home of the Rick Burner,” which emphasised the fact that the cause of an outburst of incendiarism in Suffolk was the greed of the farmers who underpaid their labourers.Punchalso took up the cause of the sweated labourers in verse:
I’ll sing you a fine old song, improved by a modern pate,Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate,But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate.Some seven shillings each a week for early work and late,Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.
I’ll sing you a fine old song, improved by a modern pate,Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate,But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate.Some seven shillings each a week for early work and late,Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.
I’ll sing you a fine old song, improved by a modern pate,Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate,But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate.Some seven shillings each a week for early work and late,Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.
I’ll sing you a fine old song, improved by a modern pate,
Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate,
But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate.
Some seven shillings each a week for early work and late,
Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time.
Nor didPunchshrink from looking a good deal higher than the fine Old English Gentleman for his victims. He had a special, almost a Lloyd Georgian, taste for baiting dukes. He attacked the Duke of Norfolk with admirable irony for suggesting to the poor that they should eke out their miserable fare by using curry powder. He made butts in turn of the Duke of Marlborough,the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Sutherland, the Duke of Richmond and the Duke of Atholl. He did not spare even the Duke of Wellington. “The old Duke,” he declared, “should no longer block up the great thoroughfare of civilisation—he should be quietly and respectfully eliminated.” It was in the same mood that the Marquis of Londonderry was denounced both as a tyrannical coal-owner and an enemy of the Queen’s English—“the most noble, but not the most grammatical Marquis.”Punch’sview of the House of Lords is expressed with considerable directness in his scheme for reforming the Chamber, which begins:
It is an indisputable truth that there can be no such thing as a born legislator. As unquestionable is the fact that there may be a born ass.But your born ass may be born to your legislator’s office, and command a seat in the house of legislators by inheritance, as in not a few examples, wherein the coronet hides not the donkey’s ears.
It is an indisputable truth that there can be no such thing as a born legislator. As unquestionable is the fact that there may be a born ass.
But your born ass may be born to your legislator’s office, and command a seat in the house of legislators by inheritance, as in not a few examples, wherein the coronet hides not the donkey’s ears.
This is not particularly brilliant. It is interesting not so much in itself as because it is the sort of thing with whichPunchused regularly to regale its readers.Punchin those days was a paper with a purpose. Its humour, like Dickens’s was to a certain extent a missionary humour.Punchsaw himself as the rescuer of theunderdog, and, if he could not achieve his object comically, he was prepared to do it angrily. He did not hesitate to fling his cap and bells rudely in the face of royalty itself. He might be accused of vulgarity, but not of being, as he has since become, the more or less complacent advocate of Toby, the top-dog.
Mr. Graves seems to think that the change in the spirit ofPunchis due to the mellowness that comes with increasing years. But the real reason, I fancy, is that, whilePunchbegan under an editor whose sympathies were with the bottom-dog, the sympathies of later editors have been much more respectable. It is not thatPunchhas lost the fire of youth, but that it has lost the generosity of the Victorian man of letters. It was, it may be admitted, easier to be generous in those days. A Victorian could make himself the champion of the ill-used poor without any feeling that he was assisting in bringing about a new order in society. A middle-class Georgian who attaches himself to the same cause cannot do so without realising that it is not a question of patching an old suit of clothes, but of making a new and a better one. The Victorian committed himself to charity. The Georgian has to commit himself to the cold-blooded charity of equality.Punch, indeed, seems to have begun to take alarmas soon as the Chartist movement made it appear likely that the workers were going to demand, not sympathetic treatment, but something like self-determination. By 1873, according to Mr. Graves, “references to the champagne-habit among the miners abound.” In a cartoon, “From the Coal Districts,” we are shown a lady in a fruiterer’s saying, “I’m afraid I must give up the pineapple, Mr. Green! Eight shillings is really too much!” She is interrupted by a “successful collier” who bids the fruiterer, “Just put ’em up forme, then, Master. ’Ere’s ’arf a sovereign; and look ’ere—yer may keep the change if yer’llonly tell us ’ow to cook ’un.”Punch, as we know it to-day, had been born.
It is interesting to trace the change in the temper ofPunch, not only in domestic, but in foreign, affairs.Punchappears to have given up his pacifism—or, as Mr. Graves calls it with reforming zeal, his “pacificism”—as a result of his generous sympathy with insurgent Italians and Hungarians. That was the thin end of the wedge. Having once drawn the sword,Punchfound it even more enjoyable than drawing cartoons. He drew it fiercely against the Russians in the Crimean War. He drew it fiercely against the Indians in the Indian Mutiny. He drew it on behalf of General Eyre after thenegro outbreak in Jamaica. He drew it against Lincoln in the American Civil War. Mr. Graves ought, for historical reasons, to have reprintedPunch’sparody on one of Lincoln’s speeches. He is content, however, to describe it as “a truly lamentable performance, in which the President claims dictatorial powers, calls for whipcord to whip the rebels, abuses the ‘rotten old world,’ talks with the utmost cynicism of the blacks, and in general behaves like a vulgar buffoon.” Mr. Graves, with an impartiality which cannot be too highly praised, reminds thePunchof those days that “the magnanimous Lincoln would never allow” the Southerners to be called rebels in his presence—a significant reminder when we recall how Mr. Lloyd George drew on the Lincoln parallel in defending his treatment of the Irish. But, for the ironist, the most amusing of allPunch’sblunders in regard to foreign policy is the welcome he offered to the birth of the German Navy in an article called “Bravo, Bismarck!” “Britannia through herPunch,” he wrote, “rejoices to weave among her naval azures a new shade—Prussian blue.” It is only fair to say thatPunchwas not consistent in his attitude to Germany. But he has shown a curious capacity for backing the wrong horse—the horse that seemed to “get away” at the start, but thatwas ultimately disqualified by the stern judge, history. He gave up championing lost causes and took to championing causes that would be lost a generation later.
In the result, Mr. Graves, though a wit of distinction, has produced inMr. Punch’s History of Modern Englanda book that is pathetic rather than amusing. It is a cemetery of dead jokes—the offspring of a little gentleman with a long nose who was cross more often than he was funny.Punch, indeed, has been for the most part a grinner rather than a wit. It has had, and still has, brilliant writers on its staff. But its temper is not the temper of its most brilliant contributors. Its attitude is that of the prosperous clubman who dislikes the advance both of the new rich and of the old poor. It has undoubtedly made itself the most successful comic paper in the world, but one sometimes wonders whether it has done so as a result of allying itself with comedy or of allying itself with success. Yet the fact remains that other men have started rivals toPunch, and that they have not only been not so successful asPunchbut not so comic.Punchalways baits the hook of its odious politics with a reasonable amount of comedy about things in general, and in the comedy of things in general, even if we think it might be done still better, it has at least alwaysbeen ahead of its rivals. There have been men who have dreamed of aPunchthat would bring the spirit of comedy to bear on all sides impartially. There are others who have dreamed of bringing the spirit of comedy to bear on the right side. One would not, perhaps, mind what sidePunchwas on if only it were a little more generous—if only it purveyed the human comedy as a comedy, and not, as in the case of working men, Irishmen, and non-Allied foreigners, as a sinister crook melodrama.