Punch—and the Bloomsbury School
AS there will, I take it, always be a Chelsea Cliques there will, no doubt, always be a Bloomsbury School, despite Mr. Humbert Wolfe's malicious wit :- " Confident that Art and Brains Died with them and Maynard Keynes The School of Bloomsbury lies here, Greeting the unknown with a sneer."
The superiority of the intelligentsia and even more con• spicuously of the pseudo-intelligentsia is manifest and unconquerable. The I and P-I together make up for the purposes of this communication, the Bloomsbury Schools And the Bloomsbury School does not like Punch. It does not like the Spectator. It will no doubt deign occasionally to glance at the more perverse paragraphs of other weeklies. What it makes of the daily papers, morning and evening, one simply cannot imagine. Per- haps news is not so important as views, and views can be held and aired more easily where the crude facts of life do not obtrude.
I repeat, the Bloomsbury School does not approve of Punch. One of the School's chief ornaments, whose literary ability is only equalled by a congenital and con- scientiously developed talent for advertising himself and his clever family, once said in my presence that Punch had never printed a joke which could amuse any man of real intelligence. I reminded him that at least one really intelligent man—to wit, myself—was regularly amused ; and that I knew of others. And if there are indeed any people who find that they cannot laugh at Mr. E. V. Knox or Mr. A. P. Herbert (to say nothing of Mr. Albert Had- dock) they are not to be envied. The trouble certainly does not lie with A. P. H. or Evoe, but with some defect of temper in the reader. I imagine, however, that the members avoid the risk of laughing at the jokes in Punch by never seeing them—it being as much as their place in the School is worth to be found handling the unclean thing.
It need not, however, be denied that many intelligent people outside the School (to cling to the courageous assumption that any such exist), while they appreciate much of the fare provided each week by the Sage of Bouverie Street, regret that the menu is so definitely re- stricted. Without making an Important and Absorbing Subject, which after all has been• from the beginning of civilization one of the main sources of laughter to man- kind and was no doubt intended so to be, by a merciful Providence conscious of the tough job it had set humanity in the task of life—without making it, I say, as tiresome both with pen and pencil, as La Vie Parisienne contrives to make it, Punch might, we think, venture to recognize occasionally what I hope even the least licentious among us admit to each other and to our friends (of both sexes in these free days), that there is much honest diversion to be got out of Sex as a Fount of Humour ; and little harm where good taste and discretion handle the reins. To maintain so strict a taboo on a discreet and decent humour in this kind is to put a premium on the more dubious issues of the Stock Exchange.
However, as Punch takes some pride in being a family newspaper, and as the British Family is notoriously above " that sort of thing "—an opinion which must make the Bright Young People of our day grin affably over their cocktails—we must not perhaps look for any startling change in this direction. Besides, to be fair, there are sound arguments, moral and financial, for the more con- servative view ; and most of us, I imagine, would rather have our Punch as it is than a London Life in the Gallic -manner.
More serious, perhaps, is our impression that the fearless Punch, who in his youth hit hard at the heads of the mighty, does now in his maturity play a little too con- scientiously for safety. Stock figures of fun—the soup- blowing profiteer, the cit on horseback, and the ample fur-clad wives of these ; the blowsy char, the pretentious butler, the lazy working-man—figure all too frequently as butts for his not too unkindly humour. We find no castigation of the snobbery of the hunting field and other haunts of the really old best people, though indeed A. P. H. has been allowed to make some fun about a " bad fox." And perhaps there might be a little more bite in its cartoons both in the drawing and the captions.
Ana here, making an end of our grievances, let us count our blessings : a paper thoroughly English, duly setting forth the English tradition of tolerance and free- dom from malice ; a light-hearted record indispensable to historians of .English common life day by day, not complete, indeed a little narrow—but we have already noted that ; a good-tempered chastiser of the comfortable worldling's little foible and vanities.
Under its distinguished Editor Punch has raised its general literary standard, notably in his own province of light verse. Punch in simple truth, and contrary to the opinion contained in the long current jest, is better than it ever was. When A. A. M. basely abandoned Miss Middleton and the Rabbits for Belinda and Christopher Robin, Punch suffered a loss ; but the more broadly human A. P. H., one of England's most promising political and social reformers, has more than filled the gap ; and Evoe, with his dexterous gift of happy nonsense stiffened with a keen sardonic humour, makes laughter out of the most trivial incidents of daily life ; the knowledgeable and wise veterans E. V. Lucas and Charles Graves finely keep up their paper's prestige ; one of the newer men, Anthony Armstrong, capably guys the Army and less august institutions ; P. R. Chalmers adds a gracious fancy to a deep love of country life and country sports ; the " outsiders " have to satisfy as conscientious and exigent an Editor as ever swung round on his chair to welcome or bite the nervous caller.
To turn from pen to pencil : Shepard with his graceful line, Reynolds and Belcher with their shrewd eye for character, Baumer carrying on not unworthily the work of Du Maurier as recorder of passing modes and manners, George Morrow with his odd fancies and brilliant line, Fougasse with his genuinely ridiculous inventions, W. K. Haselden with his witty caricatures and titles, with help from a dozen competent others, make up as sound and laughter-making a team as any paper in the world commands.
There was once a certain peer who, proposing to stretch forth his hand and buy up Punch, was outraged to find that Punch was not for sale, determined to put it out of business by creating a rival sheet of unexampled wit, humour and satire. The Little Hunchback had the laugh of the Great Man, whose 'offspring was still-born. And there were other earlier rivals that faded peacefully away The Sage is still laughing. The Bloomsbury
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