BOOKS.
MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND.* The great success of Mr. Punch's History of the War indicated further publications on the same lines and from the same author.
• Mr. Punch's radon, of Modern Engkmd. By Charles L. Graves. 4 sob., London : Cassell and Co. In 3s. net.]
Mr. 0. L. Graves is now writing Mr. Punch's History of Modern England, and we have the first two volumes. This history is, in many ways, curiously unlike the History of the War. The History of the War necessarily dealt with a short and definite period and Mr. Punch's policy was all of a piece. Although at first sight it seemed an impossible task to make weekly jokes on a subject which was far more harrowing than humorous, Mr. Punch, so far as we remember, never made a mistake in taste. In that particular respect he was infallible. In the new history we find him very fallible indeed. We do not mean fallible in taste but fallible in political sagacity ; and it should be under- stood that politics were a very serious matter with him in his earlier years. To-day Mr. Punch might fairly be said to reflect public opinion, but he began by setting himself against the crowd and was at first not only a Radical, but a democrat before democracy was understood by the majority. Some newspapers are able to develop a personality although no writers appear by name in their pages. Punch may have had such a personality for some years when Mayhew, h Beckett, Douglas Jerrold, Tom Hood and others were all writing in a crusading spirit on behalf of the under-dog in the social life of England. It does not appear to-day. We now recognize various individual personalities by the internal evidence of their writing ; they are very good indeed—we have never been able to see any sense in the laboured affectation of contempt for Punch—but they do not represent a united body of opinion tending in a particular direction.
When Mr. Punch's staff ceased to be a team serving a particu- lar cause they began to make political mistakes—rather para- doxically, as one might have supposed that the dwindling of a definite political enthusiasm would have made discretion easier. What we like in the tradition of Punch, however, is that when the paper recognized that it had made a mistake it always said so. It maligned Peel and it heaped silly ridicule upon Abraham Lincoln, treating him as a clown, but it made hand- some amends to both. We have often wondered why some papers find it so difficult to do this simple and obvious thing. A confession of error appeals to everybody and is everywhere taken as a guarantee of honesty. But for some obscure reason a profession of omniscience seems to be preferred by many papers even when the operation of reconciling obvious contra- dictions cannot really impose upon anybody. One of the best points in Mr. Graves's wise and skilful editing is that he does not attempt to explain away ; he acknowledges faults candidly. The confession of fallibility does not, of course, make this history the less interesting, for fallibility is in itself a highly interesting thing, and it necessarily plays a very large part in all history which is truthfully written.
Mr. Graves tells us something about the early contributors to Punch, but we should like to have been told more. We should like to have heard much more, for example, about John Leech, Hood, Mayhew, Lemon, Tenniel, Charles Keene, Albert Smith, and indeed many .others. Probably traditions and stories of these men linger round Mr. Punch's table. It may be said that it was not Mr. Graves's duty to write biography, but then Leech and Tenniel and Hood and Keene are part of the history of England. The present writer can remember that when he was a boy the reputation of Albert Smith's lectures— particularly his lecture on Mont Blanc—was still a real thing. Smith's lectures took London by storm ; people who had not heard them were out of the fashion ; and yet when one looks back and reflects that they were little more than narratives of ordinary travel one can scarcely understand the reason for their triumph. There was a reason no doubt, but what ? Was a rather loud humour the only secret ? Leech was such a prolific producer that perhaps the extreme characteristic impression of the man is hardly to be obtained from the pages of Punch. He contributed so much elsewhere—to Hood's Comic Annual, to Jerrold's Shilling Magazine, eto. ; nevertheless, some of his best drawings appeared in Punch, and Mr. Graves reproduces the striking cartoon at the beginning of the Crimean War, entitled " General Fevrier turned Traitor."
The early writers? of Punch, ardent in -their social mission, shouted, as it were, lest they might not be heard. Such abuse as they showered upon people whom they did not like is not to be found in Punch nowadays. Some of our intellectual frondeuts would have us believe that English political humour is con- temptible because it is not acrid. They have, perhaps, failed to notice that all political humour is not only an expression of temperament but an index to the degree of tolerance. To persuade a British caricaturist to produce drawings like those in some French, German or Russian humorous journals you would have to turn him into a Frenchman or a Teuton or a Slay. Personally we do not desire this. The sacra indignatio of Mr. Punch when he was young was directed not so much against persons as against abuses and public selfishness ; but in the process many individuals were attacked. The motive of Mr. Punch's contributors was horror at the sufferings of the people in the " Hungry 'Forties." It seems hardly credible now that a Tory newspaper should'have written with such imbecile callousness as that quoted by Mr. Graves about the demonstrations of miserable men. " There has been for the last few days," wrote this paper, " a smile on the face of every well-dressed gentleman "—When the cause of the demonstrators had been heavily defeated in the House of Commons. Punch virtually accepted' the programme of the Chartists. Mark Lemon was the editor when Tom Hood sent in his immortal " Song of the Shirt." Most of the staff were for rejecting it as inappropriate to a comic journal, but Lemon insisted and, of course, it dwarfed everything else in the number in which it appeared. Mr. Punch when he was young was also very much " agin " the Dukes, taking them as the representatives of the selfish Party. Once his enthusiasm caused the springs of his humour to dry up, when he wrote in serious disapproba- tion of Maule's famous judgment in the case of a poor man who applied for a divorce. Maule's devastating irony seems to have escaped Mr. Punch for the moment. Possibly the ironist did not expect irony in others. The Prince Consort was another of the public persons whom Mr. Punch liked to lash, but here again handsome amends were made when Prince Albert disappeared from the scene. It was, by the way, Douglas Jerrold who invented the name " Crystal Palace " for Prince Albert's Great Exhibition building.
That Mr. Punch's early Radicalism was an act of humanity, and did not consort with that political frame of mind which makes difficulties for the country in time of war, was proved by the almost Jingo attitude of the paper when the Crimean War began. Mr. Graves, by the way, does not know that Lord Dundonald's much talked of secret plan for beating the Russians; is no longer a secret. The Government of the day had no doubt that the plan would succeed, but they refused to use it on the ground that it was too horrible. The plan is fully described in the Panmure Papers. It was simply a suggestion for smoking out the Russians with sulphur and straw and other noxious fumes—a kind of comparatively innocent gas attack. It is odd that Mr. Graves should have overlooked this as he has consulted the Panmure Papers on another point. The Leech cartoon on page 121 of Vol. I. of the Queen dismissing Palmerston —we presume that the occasion was the indiscreet dispatch which Palmerston sent on his own authority at the time of Louis Napoleon's coup d'itat—suggests to us another historical comment. In the Duke of Bedford's family a story is preserved that Lord John Russell, when he was in an insecure position later as Foreign Secretary and generally out of favour, reminded his constituents in a speech that he was a very old servant of the Queen. " Do . you think," he said, " that after I have been so long in service Her Majesty will just send for me one morning and say, ' John '—." He got no further than his own Christian name before the image of the aged butler being turned out had won over his constituents. This image was probably suggested to Lord John Russell in the cartoon to which we have referred. He and Palmerston are represented aes butler- and footman, standing before the Queen, who says " I'm very sorry, Palmerston, that you cannot agree with your fellow-servants ; but as I don't feel inclined to part with John, you must go, of course."
Before we reach the end of Vol. II. Du Maurier has appeared as social satirist. It is not easy to explain his charm, either from the point of view of the draughtsmanship or from that of satire, as he often turns into harmless prettiness what is meant to be a rebuke. But he is somehow delightful. Perhaps his chief power was in conveying a drawing-room crowd which melts away in the background into the recesses of what Disraeli would call the saloon. When we leave him, however, be has not yet invented Mrs. Ponsonby de Tompkins. We bolt forward to her and to much else in the net two Volumes, as we are confident that everybody also Wilt who reads the first two,
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