Chapter XI: Part I: Loyal Toasts (3)

Buffalo Bill's "Wild West" Show in West Kensington in 1887 struck a somewhat new note. _Punch_ was impressed by the buck-jumping, but the rest smelt too much of footlights and sawdust, and he asks, "Why should Noble Savages be always beaten by the Cowboys?" Still "Buffalo Bill" was a picturesque figure, with a not undistinguished record of active service; the Queen's visit is appropriately described in the "Hiawatha" metre, and Du Maurier, in a spirited fantasy, hints that the introduction of a team of buck-jumping ponies would brighten the monotonous decorum of the meets of the Four-in-Hand Club.

The absurdities of the annual Exhibitions did not escape _Punch_ in their earlier days. At the "Healtheries" he describes a representation of a street in Old London, in which there was a girl in Tudor costume selling photographs! The strange miscellaneous international exhibitions which followed the first four were rich in material for ridicule. A prominent attraction at the Anglo-Danish Exhibition of 1888 was a "grotto of Mystery," consisting chiefly of skeletons. At the Italian Exhibition which followed, the great feature was the "Triumph of Titus," a representation of a gladiatorial contest, and chariot races by "wild omnibus horses." The sons of Belial, as represented by Master Freddy, who was disappointed because "they didn't have lions and--and real martyrs," were dissatisfied, but Mr. Anstey in his "Voces Populi" had a glorious time.

Ridicule predominates in the notice of the Spanish Exhibition in 1889, and in the same year _Punch_ devoted a special number to the Paris Exhibition, containing the impressions of his staff, and bristling with references to the Eiffel Tower, Paulus, the comic singer, and other delights. In 1889 also Barnum returned, "the greatest Showman," in _Punch's_ opinion, "of this or any other age"; and the autobiographic speech which he made on the occasion of the opening of his show at Olympia prompted _Punch_ to revive old memories:--

Forty-five years ago Albert Smith wrote in Bentley's _Miscellany_ a
paper entitled "A Go-a-head Day with Barnum." The article wound up by
saying: "As we expressed our fatigue at supper, Barnum said, 'Well, I
don't know what you call work in England; but if you don't make thirty
hours out of the twenty-four in Merekey, I don't know where you'd be
at the year's end. If a man can't beat himself in running, he'll never
go ahead; and if he don't go ahead, he's done.'" The Great Barnum is
apparently as active in 1889 as he was in 1844. He is as enthusiastic
on the wrong side of eighty as he was on the right side of forty. 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.

The increasing predominance of pastime throughout this period is faithfully illustrated in the pages of _Punch_. It is true that he never was much of a racing man, though always ready to find parallels in the classic events for political situations, and, as we have noted elsewhere, anxious to safeguard the privileges of the equestrian. But hunting and fishing cuts are far less frequent than in the days of Leech and Mr. Briggs, and in 1881 we find _Punch_ lamenting the degeneracy of modern sports-big battues, champagne luncheons on the moors, the lavish refreshment of the shooters and the facile butchery of tame birds.

[Sidenote: _Futile Feats_]

In 1882 we meet a series of sporting illustrations from the victims' point of view--e.g., a coursing match as envisaged by the hare with a crowd of yelling "sportsmen" looking on. _Punch_ had respected and admired the pugilists of the old school, but here, again, he found signs of decadence. In 1890 Slavin, an Australian, fought Jem Smith in France, and the crowd intervened and ill-treated the former, who won. _Punch_ treats the affair in a neo-Virgilian episode (somewhat in the style of his lay on the Sayers-Heenan contest), which takes the form of a dialogue between "Punchius" and "Sayerius" in the Elysian Fields; and when _Punch_, after narrating the fight, asks the shade of Sayers what he thought of it, Sayers thinks the sooner the P.R. is put down the better. The craze for contests for futile endurance met with no encouragement from _Punch_. When swimming for women was advocated in the _Medical Press and Circular_ in 1878, _Punch_ printed a letter on "Maids and Mermaids" in the style and over the signature of "William Cobbett" vigorously recommending this exercise. But a year or so later, when Miss Beckwith swam for a hundred hours in a tank, _Punch_ registered a vehement protest against these "agony-point Amusements." The spectacle of a girl of eighteen floundering in a tank for a hundred hours at a stretch was to him as objectless as it was penitential, as ungraceful as it was degrading. 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." Even in the noble sport of mountaineering _Punch_ found symptoms of a vainglorious love of self-advertisement. His tribute to Mr. Whymper in 1880 is decidedly two-edged. Under title of "Excelsior, Excelsissimus" _Punch_ salutes his achievements with a strong undercurrent of satire, suggesting, e.g., that he should "change his name from Whymper to Crow and take for his crest a Chanticleer _struttant_, _chantant_ on a mountain reduced to a molehill." _Punch_ winds up on the same disparaging note;--

If ever a Gentleman was entitled to advertise himself as "in the
perpetual Snow line," Whymper is the man, a self with no Company.
We propose that the Empire he has so proudly assisted over the
old-established inaccessibilities of the world should be recognized as
a higher form of Imperialism--Whymperialism.

The overdoing of athletics at schools is a favourite topic in these years, but on the whole _Punch_ acquiesced in the new and formidable organization of pastimes of all sorts that went on in the 'seventies and 'eighties. He saw nothing but wholesome rivalry in contests with the Dominions. The early visits of the Australian cricket teams are dealt with at great length. In 1878, the year of Spofforth's "demoniacal" exploits, we read how,

The Australians came down like a wolf on the fold,
The Mary'bone cracks for a trifle were bowled;
Our Grace before dinner was very soon done,
And our Grace after dinner did not get a run.

Criticism was not wanting, but it was not directed against the visitors. At the close of the season _Punch_ gives wholesome advice to English cricketers to repair their bad taste, bad management and bad play, and the advice is not without its point in 1921. _Punch_ had already adapted Byron for his purpose; now he turned to Campbell:--

The Cricketers of England!
They yet may have their turn,
When pique, and fuss, and funk depart
And good pluck and luck return.
Meanwhile, ye smart Australian lads,
Our parting cup shall flow
To the fame of your name,
Who have laid our wickets low;
Who have bowled great Grace, and scored from Shaw,
And laid all our wickets low!

[Sidenote: _Dr. W. G. Grace_]

In the valedictory lines a week later _Punch_ wishes the Australians godspeed on their homeward journey, with special mention of Spofforth, Gregory, Bannerman, Blackham and Boyle. They returned in 1880, and the match at the Oval inspired the usual Lion and Kangaroo cut. W. G. Grace made 152 and Murdoch 153, but England won. _Punch_ celebrates the heroic contest in the manner of Macaulay. "W. G." was now one of _Punch's_ special heroes. He had even in 1878 bracketed him with Mr. Gladstone in "The Two W. G.'s" (based on "The Two Obadiahs," a popular song of the hour), and in July, 1880, the verses on "Grace: an Ode à la mode," are a good picture of W. G. in his large mastery of the grand style:--

_Or Many-Centuried Marvel of the Modern (Cricket) World, in his high-soaring, top-scoring, Summer-day Flight. (Dr. William Gilbert Grace.)_

As Champion him the whole World hails,
Lords! How he smites and thumps!
It takes a week to reach the Bails
When he's before the Stumps.

"_Chevy Chase_" (_revised_).
]

Praxiteles should have sculped thee, not that thou
Art slim, soft-moulded, sleek-limbed, epicene,
Nay, faith, but swart, square-shouldered, stalwart, keen,
With bellying shirt back-blown and beaded brow,
Brawny bat-gripping hands, and crisp-curled beard
As black as Vulcan's own.

FAIR BATTER (ætat. 18): "Now, just look here, Algy Jones--none of your Patronage! You _dare_ to Bowl to me with your Left Hand again, and I'll Box your Ears!"]

[Sidenote: _Two Views of Lord's_]

In 1888 when Grace made 215 runs at Brighton _Punch_ saluted him as "my black-bearded, cricketing Titan," and in 1889 he figures in a fancy portrait as "The Leviathan Bat" with scores on his wings. From 1880 onwards notices of matches abound; Eton and Harrow, and the Canterbury Week in 1881, and in 1882 Southey is laid under contribution to celebrate the "famous victory" of Australia at the Oval with Spofforth as hero of the occasion. Surrey _v._ Notts in 1887 inspires a column of verses from an enthusiastic Surreyite with due praise of W. W. Read, K. J. Key and the exhilarating and intrepid George Lohmann. 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. But the verses on "Lord's" in the same year contain a serious and even ponderous indictment of the fetish-worship of athleticism, "the Muscle-Cultus forced into a fever," with a lurid portrait of the "adipose Old Blue," and the decline of the popular compiler of centuries into that "unvirile _vaurien_ a Town-dangler" with no profession, no intellectual resources, no interests save his own past. Yet in the very next year _Punch_ glorified Lord's in an illustration of the Pavilion crowded with portraits of cricketing celebrities--"W. G.," I. D. Walker, A. J. Webbe, Lord Harris, A. P. Lucas, C. J. Thornton, Alfred Lyttelton, A. G. Steel, C. T. Studd, etc. Whether this was intended as an _amende_ or not, I cannot say, but it was certainly a considerable advertisement.

If space is limited, there is no reason why one shouldn't play with one's next-door neighbours, over the garden wall. (One needn't visit them, you know.)]

Passing on to 1892, we find that _Punch_ was petrified in that year by the exploits of "Ranji," who scored eleven centuries in that season. His laudatory ode, however, is largely taken up with efforts to wrestle with the spelling and pronunciation of the hero's name, for the now familiar abbreviation had not been generally adopted.

Cricket was still the national pastime _par excellence_, but new rivals were already creeping up. Lawn tennis, even in 1878, had ceased to be the monopoly of fashionable circles; it was already invading the suburbs. In 1885 _Punch_ sang, after Tennyson,

For other games may come and go,
Lawn Tennis lives for ever.

Two years later Du Maurier satirized the social importance attached to the stars of the "Lawn-Tennis world." Football was not yet regarded, by _Punch_ at any rate, as a serious competitor. Professionalism was as yet in its infancy. _Punch_ greeted the Maori team which visited England in 1888, and complimented them on their successes over Surrey and Kent:--

Your kicking, brother Maoris,
Has given us the kick;
You're well matched all, well "on the ball,"
And strong, and straight, and quick.
By Jove, this is a rum age,
When a New Zealand team
Licks Bull at goal and scrummage!
It beats Macaulay's dream.

You're welcome, brother Maoris,
Here's wishing you good luck!
With you there pace and power is,
And skill, and lots of pluck.
A trifle "rough." Why, just so!
But that you'll mend, no doubt,
And win, all Sportsmen trust so,
In many a friendly bout.

[Sidenote: _Baseball Arrives_]

The allusion to rough play is not an isolated mention; John Bull is shown protesting in the same month (October, 1888) against "this brutal sort of thing," in a cut in which the players are arrayed in knee-breeches and long stockings; and a year later two football players, after losing the match, are shown carrying off the referee in a bag. Lacrosse was already acclimatized in England in the early 'eighties, and the visit of the Toronto Club in 1888 gave impetus to a fine game which has never seriously threatened the popularity of cricket and football.

The American baseball team who came over in the spring of 1889 not only failed to impress _Punch_, they excited him to hostile and unsympathetic comment on a game which he didn't understand and didn't want to. Still, he had the grace to admit that he was a prejudiced spectator; also that the players were as agile as cats and threw like catapults. He had not the vision to foresee a time when "baseball results" would be a daily feature of the tape and an Exalted Personage would be credited with the confession that he thought it was a better game to watch than cricket, adding, however, "for goodness' sake, don't say that I said so, or there might be a Revolution."

"I say, Uncle, that was Young Baldock that went by--Wilmington Baldock, you know----!"

"Who the dickens is _he_?"

"What! Haven't you heard of him? Hang it! He's making himself a very first-rate position in the _Lawn-Tennis_ world, I can tell you!"]

[Sidenote: _Lawn Tennis v. Golf_]

Pastime was not only being organized, systematized, commercialized. It was beginning to be the subject of serious literary and scientific study. The _Badminton Library_ series dates from 1885, when the first three volumes were published. _Punch_ made excellent fun of the Duke of Beaufort's preface, repeated in each volume, with its glowing account of the Prince of Wales's accomplishments as a sportsman, and of the literary lapses of the Duke and his editors. The volume on Golf, by Horace Hutchinson, with contributions by Mr. Balfour and Andrew Lang, certainly did not lay itself open to this rebuke. It was a delightful tribute to the charm of a pastime which had invaded England seriously in the 'eighties. Golf had been played sporadically in the south ever since the days of James I. But until the 'eighties, the golfer was looked upon as a species of lunatic. _Punch's_ first notable acknowledgment of the fascinations of the Royal and Ancient Game dates from 1885, when Du Maurier in "The Golf Stream" shows the stream of all ages and both sexes that "flows along the Eastern Coast of Scotland during the summer and autumn."

Flows along the Eastern Coast of Scotland during the summer and autumn.

(_Vide Report of British Association--Section V._)]

The jealousy of the votaries of other pastimes is made vocal in Keene's lawn-tennis player, who sees no fun in a game which consists in "knockin' a ball into a bush and then 'untin' about for it." Even in 1890 Du Maurier represents the newcomer in an invidious light when he makes a weedy little man say to an Amazonian lady lawn-tennis player that "golf is the only game for _men_ nowadays. Lawn tennis is only for girls." _Punch_ prophesied more truly in the verses, "Golf Victor!" at the close of the same year. There it is the ladies who say, "Golf is the game for the girls":--

Henceforward, then, Golf is the game for the fair--
At home, and abroad, or in pastures Colonial,
And the shouts of the ladies will quite fill the air
For the Links that will turn into bonds Matrimonial,
And for husbands our daughters in future will seek
With the powerful aid of the putter and cleek!

In 1892 the confessions of the "Duffer" at Golf after forty years' experience are interesting from the classified gradations of competence:--

The Learned have divided golf into several categories. There is
Professional golf, the best Amateur golf, enthusiasts' golf, golf,
Beginners' golf, Ladies' golf, Infant golf, Parlour golf, the golf of
Scotch Professors. But the true Duffer's Golf is far, far below that.
The born Duffer is incurable. No amount of odds will put him on the
level of even Scotch Professors.

To-day these categories need revising; the ladies have gone up two or three classes; amateurs have not for the first time held their own with the best professionals, and even the infants are becoming formidable.

Mentions of cycling in the 'eighties are mainly confined to the tricycle. There is a strange picture of a kind of tricycle for four in 1882. Du Maurier's Pillion-Bicycle is a romantic anticipation of the "Flapper-rack" of a later age. The four chapters on "Cyclomania" in 1885, including an account of a "spin" to Brighton ending in a smash, are largely burlesque, but indicate that, though clubs were multiplying, the cult had not yet outgrown its fashionable phase, or established itself on a democratic basis.

Signs of advancing popularity, however, are manifest in 1887, when the old Scotswoman in Keene's picture observes: "Ah dinna ken what's come ower the Kirk. Ah canna bide to see our Minister spankin' aboot on yon cyclopaedy!" The publication of a new edition of Mr. Sturmey's _Handbook of Bicycling_ in the same year inspires a set of verses reviewing the immense progress made since the days of the old "bone-shaker," the expansion of the industry at Coventry, and the exploits on the racing track of Keen and other professionals. The safety bicycle associated with the name of J. K. Starley dates from 1885, but it was not until the invention of the pneumatic tyre by Dunlop in 1888 that what had been a pastime was revolutionized and became an universal mode of locomotion. _Punch_ celebrates the coming of the "Safety" in October, 1890, in "Breaking a record on the Wheel" (after Tennyson's "Break, break"), but his admiration of the exploits of Messrs. Mecredy and Osmond is tempered by regret for the heroes of the "ordinary"--Keen and the Hon. Ion Keith Falconer. _Punch_ was not aware that he was in the presence of an epoch-making invention, the most wide-reaching in its influence in our time between the railway engine and the coming of the motor. The verses make no mention of the pneumatic tyre; the present writer saw a bicycle race in 1891 at Eastbourne at which all the competitors save one rode on the high model, and he proved the winner.

"Do you evah _Wink_, Miss Evangeline?"

"Do I ever _what_, Mr. Smythe?"

"Wink?"

"What _do_ you mean, Sir?"

"Well, _skate_, if you pwefer the expwession!"]

[Sidenote: _The Vicissitudes of Pastime_]

In contrast with the ever-increasing speeding-up of life one may note _Punch's_ tribute in 1889 to the charms of caravanning; its inevitable slowness being compensated by freedom from hotel bandits and extortionate lodging-house keepers.

Rifle-shooting is a serious pursuit rather than a pastime or sport, but may claim a word of notice in this survey. The National Rifle Association came of age in 1881, and _Punch_ celebrated the event in a cartoon in which he toasts a handsome young rifleman in a Jeroboam of Perrier-Jouet, 1859, and in verses congratulating the comrades of the rifle on their long survival and triumph over official snubbing.

Lastly I may note that in the Jubilee number of _Punch_ in 1891 the popular or rather fashionable recreations in the 'sixties, 'seventies, 'eighties and 'nineties are shown in four illustrations of croquet, roller-skating, lawn tennis and golf. Of these roller-skating has temporarily disappeared. In the 'seventies "Rinkomania" was a short-lived but acute malady. It led to a good many accidents and much speculation, mostly disastrous. Much money was made and more lost by the financiers who embarked on rink-building. At the end of 1875 _Punch_ notes a report that the Albert Hall was to be converted into a Grand Skating Rink. At the moment the rumour was by no means incredible; and the scenes of social and political revelry enacted in that building of recent years must have often disturbed the _manes_ of its eponymous hero.

Lawn tennis and golf have become democratic, international and spectacular pastimes; while croquet continues to hold its own in a select, scientific and secluded circle of votaries.

FASHION IN DRESS

Men's dress had already ceased to be decorative long before the 'seventies were in their mid career. There had been spasmodic attempts to introduce a note of colour and picturesqueness into male attire, and a fresh effort was made by the apostles of the æsthetic movement, but the average man of fashion took no heed of these eccentricities. His aim was to be unobtrusively well dressed, though in the domain of pastime one may note an increasing addiction to highly coloured hose and the multiplication of club colours and ribbons.

As a chronicler and illustrator of the vagaries of Mode, _Punch_ continues to pay far more attention to the costume of women than of men. But here also one notes a change--a tendency which warrants the labelling of this period as the Age of Approximation, in which in regard both to material and design women were more and more inclined to take a leaf from the fashion books of their brothers. The increasing addiction of girls to athletic pastimes was no doubt largely responsible for a change which could not be better exemplified than in Du Maurier's picture in 1877 of an old gentleman who mistakes the Dean's three daughters for young men and is gravely corrected by the verger. The mistake was venial, for the young amazons in their ulsters and hard hats presented a decidedly masculine appearance. In a word, they were "tailor-made"--a word of vast and epoch-making significance.

[Sidenote: _The Divided Skirt_]

References to this approximation recur throughout the 'eighties. In 1880 Sambourne, taking for his text an article in the _Journal des Modes_, gives us a design of evening dress entitled, "Man or Woman--a Toss Up," and in the same year Du Maurier, in a picture of the "_Ne Plus_ Ulster," represents a customer expostulating with the shop-woman, "But it makes one look so like a man," only to be told, "That's just the beauty of it, Miss." Within limits _Punch_ applauded the change. When short dresses for dances were said to be coming in, in the same year, he dilates in verse on the salutary innovation. To the year 1881 belongs the foundation of the "Rational Dress Society." "Bloomerism," as I pointed out in an earlier volume, never appealed to Mayfair. But the Rational Dress Society claimed a live Viscountess--Lady Harberton--as its President, and recommended the adoption of a "dual garmenture" or "divided skirt" as its cardinal tenet. _Punch_ declared that the "divided skirt" was simply the old Bloomer costume slightly disguised, and saw in the movement only a fresh proof of woman's conscious inferiority:--

True that another skirt hides this insanity
Miss Mary Walker in old days began;
Yet it should flatter our masculine vanity,
For this means simply the trousers of Man!

OLD GENTLEMAN (shocked beyond description) to Verger: "Don't you think those youths had better be told to take their hats off?"

VERGER: "Take their 'ats off! Bless you, Sir, those are the _Dean's_ young ladies!"]

The Rational Dress reformers were tremendously in earnest, but they entirely failed to convert the fashionables, and _Punch_, who refused to take them seriously, ridiculed the movement in a burlesque cut of "United Trousers _v._ Divided Skirts," in which retaliation effects a _reductio ad absurdum_. An exhibition of Rational Dress was held in Prince's Hall in the summer of 1883, but _Punch_ remained unconvinced, and even obscurantist in his comments:--

We look at the models--they puzzle our noddles--
Regarding them all with alarm and surprise!
Each artful customer revives Mrs. Bloomer,
And often produces an army of guys.
The costume elastic, the dresses gymnastic,
The wonderful suits for the tricycle-ess--
Though skirts be divided, I'm clearly decided,
It isn't my notion of Rational Dress!

See gowns hygienic, and frocks calisthenic,
And dresses quite worthy a modern burlesque;
With garments for walking, and tennis, and talking,
All terribly manful and too trouseresque!
And habits for riding, for skating, or sliding,
With "rational" features they claim to possess;
The thought I can't banish, they're somewhat too mannish,
And not quite the thing for a Rational Dress!

Note robes there for rinking, and gowns for tea-drinking,
For yachting, for climbing, for cricketing too;
The dresses for boating, the new petticoating,
The tunics in brown and the trousers in blue.
The fabrics for frockings, the shoes and the stockings,
And corsets that ne'er will the figure compress;
But in the whole placeful there's little that's graceful
And girlish enough for a Rational Dress!

'Tis hardy and boyish, not girlful and coyish--
We think, as we stroll round the gaily-dight room--
A masculine coldness, a brusqueness, a boldness,
Appears to pervade all this novel costume!
In ribbons and laces, and feminine graces,
And soft flowing robes, there's a charm more or less--
I don't think I'll venture on dual garmenture,
I fancy my own is the Rational Dress.

[Sidenote: _Punch the "Anti-Rationalist"_]

Strong-minded women, in _Punch's_ view, only emphasized their angularity by the masculinity of their attire--witness his "Aunt Jemima," an uncompromising Blue Ribbonite, in an ulster and hard felt hat, explaining to a French cab-driver that the extra half-franc is a "_pour-manger_" and not a "_pour-boire_." The allusion to corsets in the lines quoted above may be supplemented by a paragraph which appeared early in 1891 showing that the "rationalizing" of dress had spread to the Dominions. At Sydenham, Ontario, corsets had been declared, in a memorable phrase, to be "incompatible with Christianity." To the end of this period _Punch_ discourages the extremes of the "Rational" school. His wittiest criticism is the paradoxical remark put in the mouth of one girl who disapproves of the mannish costume of a friend in a covert coat with a man's hat: "It makes you look like a Young Man, you know, and that's so effeminate!" The small deer-stalking cap worn by the lady, salmon fishing with a formidable gillie, in 1885, is identical with that worn by the male sportsman. The ulsters and "golf-capes," worn by women when travelling, and the narrow-brimmed felt hats shown in 1891, are practically identical for men and women; and in 1892 _Punch_ laments (after Herrick) the introduction of the loose "sack" coat, in imitation of the masculine model:--

Whenas my Julia wears a sack,
That hides the outline of her back,
I cry in sore distress, Alack!

Later on in the same poem his clothes philosophy is summed up in six lines:--

Although men's clothes are always vile--
The coat, the trousers and the "tile"--
Some sense still lingers in each style.

But women's garments should be fair,
All graceful, gay, and debonair,
And if they lack good sense, why care?

[Sidenote: _Slaves of Fashion_]

In the last three lines we find the whole essence and spirit of Du Maurier's method. He proved to demonstration again and again that women could dress in the fashion of the moment and be delightful to look at, so long as they were the judicious interpreters and not the Slaves of Mode. If he saw no beauty in the designs of the "Rationalists," and habitually ridiculed the sprawling attitudes, the shapeless garments, and unwholesome languor of the female "æsthetes," he did not spare the monstrosities and barbarities of the ultra-fashionables. The age of lateral expansion had given place to a craze for compression, to the "eel-skin" model. Skirts were so tight in 1875 that Du Maurier suggests that upholsterers should devise a special sort of chair suited to the peculiar exigencies of ladies who can neither stoop nor sit down. Three years later a lady and a hussar officer at a dance are depicted as both equally unable to depart from a rigidly perpendicular attitude. Tight lacing was again in fashion but met with no approval from _Punch_. In 1877 Du Maurier depicts a lady resolutely determined to lace down to the waist measurement of a rival, and _Punch_ quotes with approval Miss Frances P. Cobbe's indictment of the causes which led to the "Little Health of Women." Besides tight lacing the list includes the neglect of exercise, the discouragement of appetite, sentimental brooding over disappointments, the lack of healthy occupation for mind and body, false hair, bonnets that don't protect the head, heavy dragging skirts, high heels and "pull-backs"--a tolerably comprehensive catalogue. _Punch_ renews his attack on tightly-laced pinched-in figures in his Horatian ode to "A Modern Pyrrha" in 1880, and in 1889 Jones, after offering the wasp-waisted Miss Vane tea and strawberries at a garden party, remarks to himself: "By Jove! she takes 'em--she's going to swallow 'em! But where she'll put 'em--goodness knows!"

JONES (_to himself, as he offers Miss Vane a cup of tea and some strawberries_): "By Jove! She takes 'em--she's going to swallow 'em! But where she'll _put_ 'em--goodness knows!"]

Now that fashionable skirts are worn so tight that the fair wearers thereof can neither stoop nor sit down, it might be worth somebody's while to devise a chair suited to the peculiar exigencies of the positions.]

LADY (_speaking with difficulty_): "What have you made it round the waist, Mrs. Price?"

DRESSMAKER: "Twenty-one inches, ma'am. You couldn't _breathe_ with less!"

LADY: "What's Lady Jemima Jones's waist?"

DRESSMAKER: "Nineteen-and-a-half just now, ma'am. But her Ladyship's a head shorter than you are, and she's got ever so much thinner since her illness last autumn?"

LADY: "Then make it _nineteen_, Mrs. Price, and _I'll_ engage to get into it!"]

The crusade against wearing birds' wings is an old story. The Baroness Burdett-Coutts' efforts in 1875--cordially supported by _Punch_--were prompted by the cruel practice of obtaining rare feathers by plucking birds when alive. The Baroness had approached Mme. Louise, who was sympathetic but pointed out that there was an increasing demand for this kind of decoration. _Punch_ repeatedly protests against the practice, and in 1889, when flowers were once more in fashion as hat trimmings, expressed his delight at a change which checked wholesale bird slaughter:--

When lovely woman stooped to folly,
And piled bird plumes upon her head,
She no doubt fancied she looked jolly,
But filled the woodland choirs with dread.

His delight, however, was short-lived, and in 1892 he was again moved to denounce the "Modish Moloch of the Air," and pillory, under the title of "A Bird of Prey," the woman of fashion who decked herself out in feathers.

[Sidenote: _Fringes and Bustles_]

This was the age of the fringe, another of _Punch's_ pet aversions, whether worn by 'Arriet or the maidens and matrons of Mayfair. Du Maurier lent his aid in the triple cut headed "Alas!" representing "Pretty Grandmamma Robinson" as she was in 1851, as she is now in 1880, in a tight dress cut low in front with a monstrous frizzed fringe, and finally as she might and should be--altogether a most instructive sermon on the art of growing old gracefully and the reverse.

"What does t'lass want wi' yon _Boostle_ for? It aren't big enough to _Smoggle_ things, and she can't _Steer_ herself wi' it!"]

It is interesting to note, by way of contrast, that caps were still worn in the house by quite young married women. The affectation of perennial youth was not universal in 1880. The popularity and drawbacks of the jersey are attested in the same year, when we are shown the fearful struggles of Jones in his efforts to help his lovely wife to divest herself of this garment. In 1881 reference is made to the agitation against a revival of the crinoline. The successful stand made against the "crinolette" by the Princess of Wales in 1883 is alluded to elsewhere. _Punch_ declares that the very large fans used at this time were almost as great a nuisance in the stalls as crinoline had been, but this is obviously a gross exaggeration. The red veils which were introduced in 1884 were to him a sheer abomination. "It makes girls look blear-eyed and red-nosed. It gives them the appearance of just recovering from the measles."

In the same year the ultra-smart ladies are shown wearing hats, while others still have bonnets. In 1886 Du Maurier shows ladies in a brougham specially built to match the fashion of hats with high conical crowns. The small fur capes of a few years back give place in 1887 to long fur boas--so long that one picture shows a lady walking between two men with the ends of her boa round their necks.

A more formidable monstrosity of these years was the "bustle," admirably criticized by the fisherman in Du Maurier's picture. By 1889 _Punch_ celebrated its departure along with other excrescences in a parody of Browning:--

EVELYN'S HOPE

The hideous bustle at last is dead.
Come and talk of the beast a minute!
Never again will it flourish, it's said;
What on earth we women saw in it,
Or why we liked it, is hard to discover;
Only the world is a nicer place,
Now that the pest called a "dress-improver"
Is improved, by Fashion, right off its face.

There's the tall hat, too, which they say is doomed.
One rather liked it, or viewed it with awe,
Till one sat in a theatre, and far away loomed
A rampart of feathers, frilling, and straw,
Hiding the stage, the footlights, and all,
Save perhaps the top of a paste-board tree;
Oh, then one's fingers did certainly crawl
To fling a book at the filigree!

But, some day, in Fashion's whirligig,
The monstrous bustle, the Eiffel hat,
May arise once more, even twice as big,
For our great-grandchildren to wonder at.
Well, that's Posterity's matter, not mine.
The one thing now is to put up a hymn
Of praise, and of hope that, when new suns shine,
Good taste may flourish instead of whim!

[Sidenote: _Æsthetic Children_]

In 1891 a new fashion of dressing hair in the "teapot handle" style arose and was pronounced by _Punch_ to be "frightful," and the epithet is at least justified by _Punch's_ caricature.

MAMMA: "Who are those extraordinary-looking children?"

EFFIE: "The Cimabue Browns, Mamma. They're _Æsthetic_, you know!"

MAMMA: "So I should imagine. Do you know them to speak to?"

EFFIE: "Oh dear no, Mamma--They're most _exclusive_. Why, they put out their tongues at us if we only _look_ at them!"]

Throughout this period the children in Du Maurier's pictures, however dressed, are a joy to look at. The fashion of arraying them in "æsthetic" costumes meets, however, with no favour. It is even implied that such a garb impairs their manners and conduces to arrogance, witness Du Maurier's picture of the young Cimabue Browns putting out their tongues in derision at ordinary normally clad children in the park. In 1881 we read:--

The poor little Guys who have been compelled by unthinking parents to
walk about in long skirts, antique cloaks, and coal-scuttle bonnets,
have caused so much laughter that the dress is now called "The
Grinaway Costume."

It may have been by _Punch_; but against his churlish condemnation must be set the enthusiastic approval of Kate Greenaway's illustrations by leading art critics, including Ruskin, throughout the world; and the extraordinary success of her revival of old-fashioned costumes for children. In spite of _Punch_, and in virtue of the exquisite charm of her designs, she went a long way toward justifying the verdict of one of her admirers that "Kate Greenaway dressed the children of two continents."

SHE: "Awfully nice Dance at Mrs. Masham's last night?"

HE: "Yaas. Were you there?"

SHE: "_Was I there?_ Why--I danced with you Three Times!"

HE: "Really! So glad!"]

[Sidenote: _The Demon "Topper"_]

Allusions to men's attire in this period are few and far between, and a careful study of _Punch's_ illustrations reveals little substantial divergence between the fashions of 1880 and 1920. The only approach to a crusade or campaign in which _Punch_ engaged was directed against his old enemy the "chimney pot." When Dr. Carpenter in 1882 declared that Englishmen "would rather suffer martyrdom than give up its use," _Punch_ enlarged on this text in an "anti-sanitary ballad." He reverts to the theme in "All round my hat" in 1889:--

Incarnate ugliness, bald, tasteless, flat,
My stove-pipe hat!
A rigid cylinder that engirts
My cranium close, and heats, and hurts
My head most frightfully.
It cuts, it chafes, it raises lumps,
Each vein beneath it throbs and thumps
Fiercely and spitefully;
An Incubus of woe, and yet I wear it
And grin and bear it.

Its pipy structure, black and hollow,
Would make a guy of bright Apollo,
Clapt on his crown.
It takes one's top-locks clean away,
And turns the scanty remnant grey,
Once thick and brown.
And oh! how terrible its torrid tether
In sultry weather!

Ever the same, though fashion's whim
Wide-bell the body, curl the brim,
Or more or less;
Play little tricks with shape or size,
And Yankeefy or Quakerize
Design or dress,
Long, short, broad, narrow, curled this way or that,
'Tis still a hat!

The centenary of the tall-hat (according to the _Daily News_) arrived in 1890, and _Punch_ heaped scorn on this unlovely centenarian:--

Mad was the hatter who invented
The demon "topper," and demented
The race that, spite of pain and jeers,
Has borne it--for One Hundred Years!

For holiday or sporting wear Tyrolese hats came into vogue in the late 'eighties, and the picture of two "chappies" at Monte Carlo in what is presumably the height of the fashion presents them in check tweeds, spats and Austrian _jäger_ hats. The Homburg hat belongs to a slightly later period.

Mr. A. C. Corbould, in an illustration of the correct costume for Rotten Row in 1885 and 1889, shows that for men the tall hat and frock coat had yielded in the latter year to the bowler and tweeds. The dress of the ladies shows less change, but the tall hat has gone and the skirts are grey not black. Short tailless coats for morning wear were coming in, and _Punch_ welcomes in 1889 the introduction of brown boots as a relief from "that dual despotism, dreadful grown, of needless nigritude and futile polish." Whiskers were still worn, but, amongst young men, were severely restricted in length, and shorn of the ambrosial exuberance of the 'fifties and 'sixties.

"Æsthetes" were once described as a set of long-haired men and short-haired women, and Du Maurier's pictures justify the summary, but these peculiarities were confined to a coterie; they never seriously affected the usages of Mayfair or involved any revision of the "petty decalogue of Mode." Spats were generally worn, and the "mashers" of the 'eighties carried very slim umbrellas when they took their walks abroad in the park for Sunday parade. Evening dress presents few and negligible differences from that in vogue to-day. One of the very few references to military uniforms in these years indicates the reaction against "useless flummery." A military correspondent in _The Times_ had said, in 1890, that the day of cocked hats and plumes was gone, and _Punch_ availed himself of the saying to design a new and rational uniform for general officers, so that they might be mistaken by the enemy for harmless gentlemen farmers.

LETTERS AND JOURNALISM: DRAMA AND MUSIC

As I ventured to remark in an earlier volume, a literary critic's acumen and _flair_ are better shown in his estimates of writers whose fame is as yet unassured, or who are just emerging above the horizon, than of authors of established reputation. No special credit attaches to _Punch_ for writing with reverence of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Scott or Charles Lamb, whose centenary evoked a charming tribute in 1875, when the Headmaster of Christ's Hospital appealed in _The Times_ for support in erecting a memorial to Elia in his old school. A better test is furnished in his references to Browning and Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, Charles Reade and Trollope, Jefferies and Stevenson and Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward, and, to come down to the end of this period, Kipling and Barrie. Yet all established reputations were not respected by _Punch_. When Rabelais was included in Professor Henry Morley's series of World's Classics in 1883 _Punch_ uttered a vehement protest against the choice. He calls Rabelais a "dirty-minded, scurrilous, blasphemous, witty, broadly humorous and extravagantly grotesque clerical buffoon." The _Saturday Review_ thought otherwise, but _Punch_ declared that the defence was only put forward as "a stalking-horse for a malicious attack on ourselves."

The lines on George Eliot in 1881 are brief but laudatory. The phrase declining to rank her "among the tricksy mimes" is not happy; but she is spoken of as "this large-orbed glory of our times," and _Punch_ prophesies for her "unfading bays," a prophecy to which the present generation would seem inclined to demur. _Punch_ had little to add to his previous tributes to Carlyle when the Sage of Chelsea passed away in the same year, except to express the view that he was profoundly discontented with the England of to-day:--

He lived through England's triumph, but he heard
With dying ears the shadow of decline.

MISTRESS: "As you've never been in Service, I'm afraid I can't engage you without a 'character.'"

YOUNG PERSON: "I have three School Board certificates, Ma'am!"

MISTRESS: "Oh, well--I suppose for honesty, cleanliness----"

YOUNG PERSON: "No, Ma'am--for 'Literatoor,' Joggr'phy and Free'and Drawin'!"]

[Sidenote: _Relations with American Authors_]

The founding of the Browning Society in the same year met with no more encouragement from _Punch_ than Miss Braddon's boiled-down versions of Scott's novels. _Punch_ dimly recognized Browning's greatness while resenting his obscurities and eccentricities, and in a further skit on the Society carefully disclaims any disrespect for Browning himself. This mitigated appreciation is developed in the memorial verses in 1889 which hail him as a gallant and manly singer and apostle of healthy optimism, while denying his Muse the quality of elegance. _Punch_ was nearer the mark in his laconic reference to Tupper, who died in the same year:--

"HIS NAME HAS PASSED INTO A PROVERB."

Martin F. Tupper, famed for his _Proverbial Philosophy_, has joined
the majority. He was thoroughly in earnest, and said many a true thing
in what popularly passed for poetry. He will be remembered as "The
Great Maxim Gun" of the nineteenth century.

The _Annual Register_ reminds us that in twenty-five years over 100,000 copies of _Proverbial Philosophy_ were sold in England and nearly half a million in America.

_Punch_ was happier in dealing with Longfellow than with Emerson; the description of the latter as "the cheery oracle, alert and quick," is hardly adequate. _Punch_, however, protested against the proposed monument to Longfellow in the Abbey. He had learned to appreciate J. R. Lowell, who, on leaving England in 1885 after his four years' tenure of office as American Minister, said that "he had come among them as a far-away cousin, and they were sending him away as something very like a brother." _Punch_ refused to say good-bye to this great and wise American, and his "au revoir" verses contain pleasant allusions to _The Biglow Papers_ and _Study Windows_. Nor was his welcome of Oliver Wendell Holmes a whit less cordial, when the beloved "Autocrat" visited England to receive a D.C.L. degree in 1886. Bret Harte had been welcomed by _Punch_ in 1879 as a master of wit and wisdom, humour and pathos. Though, as was said of a famous composer, he began as a genius and ended as a talent, the influence of _The Luck of Roaring Camp_[10] on the development of the short story was fruitful and abiding. To complete the record of _Punch's_ relations with American authors it may be noted that in 1881 he greeted Joel Chandler Harris, the author of _Uncle Remus_, as a benefactor; that he resented Mr. W. D. Howells's critical depreciations of Dickens and Thackeray; and that, when Walt Whitman died in 1892, he indited what was virtually a palinode:--

Whilst hearts are generous and woods are green,
He shall find hearers, who, in a slack time
Of puny bards and pessimistic rhyme,
Dared to bid men adventure and rejoice.
His "yawp barbaric" was a human voice;
The singer was a man.

[Footnote 10: It was translated in the feuilleton of an Italian paper as _La Fortuna del Campo Clamoroso_!]

To return to native writers, _Punch_ happily linked a great Churchman and a great Victorian novelist in the stanza which appeared at the close of 1882:--

Two men whose loss all Englishmen must rue,
True servants of the Studio and the State.
No manlier Churchman Trollope ever drew
Than History will portray in gentle Tait.

_Punch_ had long acclaimed Tennyson as one of the major poets; but a slight element of reserve mingles in the congratulations on his peerage in 1883. Approval is tempered by chaff, and allusion is made to the Laureate's being prevented from taking his seat in the Lords by having lost his robes. There are no reserves in the tribute to the "beloved Cambridge rhymer" C. S. Calverley, when he passed away in early middle age in 1884. The memorial verses omit all mention of Calverley's genius for high parody, and incorrectly speak of the Ode to Beer as being written in Spenserian stanzas, but are otherwise affectionately appreciative:--

Well, well, omnivorous are the Shades;
But seldom hath that Stygian sculler
Oared o'er a gayer ghost than "Blayds,"[11]
Whose transit leaves the dull world duller.

[Footnote 11: The surname borne by C. S. C. until his branch of the family resumed that of Calverley.]

[Sidenote: _Literary Controversies_]

Charles Reade, who died in the same year, is not ineptly described as the "Rupert of Letters," and his indiscretions and exuberances are overlooked in virtue of his services both as a dramatist and novelist, and the "noble rage" with which he vindicated "the master-virtue, Justice."

Echoes of a controversy over the censorship exerted by the libraries, revived periodically in later years, come to us from the years 1884 and 1885, when the banning of Mr. George Moore's novels led to a correspondence in the _Pall Mall Gazette_. Here the late Mr. George Gissing, while professing little sympathy with Mr. Moore, had fallen foul of Thackeray for truckling to the demands of Mrs. Grundy and betraying his artistic conscience--_à propos_ of the Preface to _Pendennis_. This was altogether too much for _Punch_, who belaboured Mr. Gissing to his heart's content in his most truculent vein, and did not abstain from his old and ugly habit of making offensive capital out of an antagonist's name: "humbly we own that we never heard of his name before, though it seems suggestive of a kind of guttural German embrace performed by the nationalizer of the Land [Henry George]."

Another famous literary quarrel broke out in 1886, the year of the trenchant attack, recalling the style and temper of Macaulay, on Mr. Gosse in the _Quarterly Review_ for October. As _Punch_ had already indulged in a good deal of acid pleasantry at the expense of the mutual admiration of "Poet Dobson" and "Poet Gosse," it was easy to guess on which side his sympathies would be enlisted. The sting of the _Quarterly's_ indictment lay in the statement that "the men who write bad books are the men who criticize them," and _Punch_ did not refrain from rubbing in the charge:--

Quarterly pay was dear to man
Since or ever the world began,
Chances vanish, and ventures cross,
Even sometimes for bards like Gosse;
Since or ever the world began.
Quarterly pay was dear to man.

But there's a something in quarterly pay
Which doesn't please all men alway!
Less than half-truth is a _quarter-lie_,
Bound to be found out by-and-by;
Since or ever the world began,
Quarterly pay has been strict with man.
Play straight and honest--for, if you don't,
The public meed 'tis receive you won't;
The mutual arts of puff and praise,
Even in these degenerate days,
Sink at last in the scorn they raise;
Since or ever the world began,
Quarterly pay has been straight with man.

* * * * *

Poet Dobson shall claim on high
From Poet Gosse immortality!
And Poet Dobson shall shed the same,
No doubt, upon Poet Gosse's name--
While a weak world wonders whence they came,
And never a weakling dares deny
(For there's no such thing as puffery)
To each his immortality!
Yet Quarterlies dare to say, for once,
That dunce's works are reviewed by dunce.

Shocking! Anonymous donkeys speak
Donkey's dislike of a cultured clique--
("Fudge," by Goldsmith; but now called "cheek")--
Yet since or ever the world began,
Quarterly reckoning's good for man!

The _Quarterly_, not for the first time, overshot the mark by its "savage and tartarly" methods, and the incriminated critic survived an attack fortified by accurate learning but impaired by unrestrained animosity.

[Sidenote: _Punch Salutes Mr. Kipling_]

_Punch_ resumed his genial strain in his tribute to Richard Jefferies, when that admirable prose poet of rural England and the pageantry of the seasons died prematurely in 1887. Matthew Arnold was not exactly one of _Punch's_ literary heroes. His urbanity was admitted, but _Punch_ slightly resented his intellectual superciliousness. Yet the verses on his death in 1888, cast in the "Thyrsis" stanza, acknowledge the value of his crusade against Philistinism, and the beauty of his elegiac poetry; he was "the great son of a good father." Towards Matthew Arnold's distinguished niece, Mrs. Humphry Ward, _Punch_ was less benevolent on the occasion of the appearance of _Robert Elsmere_ in the same year. The sorely tried hero is described as "wandering about, a married Hamlet in clerical attire, undecided as to his mission to set everything right and dying a victim to the Mephistophelean-Betsy-Prig spirit." Nor was _Punch_ altogether appreciative of R. L. Stevenson, though he pays a reluctant homage to his genius in one of the "Mems for the New Year" for a literary man in January, 1889: "Resolutely to avoid making the most distant reference to 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.'" The standard of precision in the editing of _Punch_ at this time was not above reproach. In the same year "Mr. J. L. Stevenson's _Master of Ballantine_" is reviewed though there was no such author and no such book. _Punch_ made amends, however, in 1890 in his salutations of two notable newcomers. In February he was delighted by "the homely simplicity," the keen observation, shrewd wit and gentle pathos of Barrie in _A Window in Thrums_. Six weeks later he recognized in Rudyard Kipling's _Plain Tales from the Hills_ a "new and piquant flavour," as of an Anglo-Indian Bret Harte. _Punch_ found an "excessive abundance of phrases and local allusions which will be dark sayings to the uninitiated." But here adverse criticism ends. For the rest he acknowledges in the new writer a surprising knowledge of life, civil, military and native, and a happy command of pathos and humour. This tribute was followed up a few weeks later by a much more characteristic act of homage in doggerel verse:--

TO THE NEW SCRIBE AND POET

Air:--"_O Ruddier than the Cherry._"

O Rudyard, in this sherry,
I drink your very, very
Good health. I would
That write I could
Like Kipling, sad or merry.

(Signed) INVIDIUS NASO.

The literary quality of _Punch's_ literary criticism was not high in these days and his outlook was decidedly limited. It is therefore a welcome surprise to find him not only recognizing the beauty of Cory's _Ionica_ in 1891, but specially singling out the famous version of the epitaph on Heraclitus. _Punch_ could not dissect it as Walter Headlam did afterwards, but he noted one blemish--the confusion of "thou" and "you." Almost as unexpected, in view of his attitude towards much contemporary realism, is _Punch's_ eulogy of Hardy's _Tess_ in 1892. Barring the "absurdly melodramatic character of the villain" _Punch_ has nothing but praise for its essential truth; acquits the author of "foolhardiness" in "boldly telling ugly truths about the Pagan Phyllises and Corydons of our dear old Christian England," and accepts his word for the faithfulness of the portraiture.

_Punch_ had rejoiced over the dissolution of the Browning Society formed by Dr. Furnivall in 1891:--

Lovers of Browning may laugh and grow fat again,
Rid of the jargon of Furnivallese.

He was not, however, any better disposed to Swinburne, Furnivall's antagonist and rival in the art of ferocious obloquy, of whom he wrote in the same year:--

There was a poor poet named Clough;
Poet Swinburne declares he wrote stuff--
Ah, well, _he_ is dead!
'Tis the living are fed,
By log-rollers on butter and puff!

[Sidenote: _Parodies and "Limericks"_]