Chapter VIII: Part II: Social Life in Transition (1)

CROWN AND COURT

In a period of change and transition, in which the decline of the influence of the old "governing classes" was attended by the rise of a new type of statesman, the stability of the throne and the prestige of the Sovereign remained unshaken; the veneration in which the old Queen was held in the last ten years of her reign was based on a respect which rendered her almost invulnerable to criticism. _Punch_, who in earlier years had appropriated the _rôle_ and privileges of the Court Jester, and in the middle Victorian period had frankly regretted the Queen's long seclusion, never alludes to her in the closing years of her reign save in a spirit of gratitude and chivalrous devotion. We hear no more of the "Royal Recluse," for the phrase no longer applied to one who in advanced years was strenuous in the discharge of her duties. There is a pleasant story that when the Queen was informed that she had reigned longer than any of her predecessors, she said: "Have I done well?" and _Punch_ supplied the answer:--

"Have I done well?" Most gracious Queen,
Look on the record of your life;
Think of What is, What might have been.
Empress of Peace 'mid constant strife!

The last year of her reign was sadly clouded by the uncertainties of the South African war, and she paid the inevitable penalty of those who live to fourscore by surviving many of those who were nearest to her; but age brought her consolations as well. The marriage of the Duke of York in 1893 inspired _Punch_ with a genial ode, full of classical tags and headed "Hymen Hymenæe!" He would not "trill a fulsome lay," but contented himself with showing "good will to goodness," typified in his cartoon of the royal pair seated on a Lion led by _Punch_ with a bridle of roses. A year later the birth of the present Prince of Wales, Queen Victoria's great-grandson, is celebrated by an ingenious adaptation of Shakespeare:--

Now is the Winter of our discontent
Made glorious by this _Son_ of York.

"Do you often attend the sittings in the House of Lords, Duke?"

"I did once--if I remember, to vote against some measure of Mr. Gladstone's--but I caught a bad cold there, so I never went again!"]

The customary official congratulations of Parliament did not escape a protest from Mr. Keir Hardie, who was "indisposed to associate himself with any effort to do special honour to the Royal family," though he was "delighted to learn that the infant was a fairly healthy one." This unfortunately-worded concession only served to exasperate the loyalists, and _Punch_ drew a picture of Mr. Hardie, in his deer-stalker cap, severely apostrophizing the royal infant in his cradle. _A propos_ of the Prince's seven names, it may be added that _Punch_ noted the inclusion of all the four patron saints of the United Kingdom--George, Andrew, Patrick and David--a choice which, as he put it, ought to help him to dodge ill luck in after years.

LITTLE LORD CHARLES: "Oh, _I'm_ going to be an _Omnibus Conductor_, when _I_ grow up."

FAIR AMERICAN: "But your brother's going to be a _Duke_, isn't he?"

L. L. C.: "Ah, yes; but that's about all he's _fit_ for, you know!"]

[Sidenote: _Punch on the Duke of Cambridge_]

No charge of courtiership, however, could be brought against _Punch_ for his treatment of the question of the retirement of the Duke of Cambridge in 1895 from the post of Commander-in-Chief. In "All the Difference" Lord Wolseley is shown saying to the Duke: "In September I have to retire from my appointment," and the Duke replies, "Dear me! _I_ haven't." The same idea is developed in some satirical verses glorifying the "Spirit of Eld," which was allowed to dominate the conduct of high affairs of State. But when the Duke did go in November, _Punch_ was more gracious. His "parting salute," put into the mouth of Tommy Atkins, forms a friendly gloss on what Lord Wolseley had said in his first Army order; and when the Duke died in 1904, _Punch's_ four-line tribute is a model of laconic and judicial appreciation:--

The years that saw old customs changed to new
Still left his spirit changeless to the end,
Who served his kindred's Throne a long life through
And died, as he had lived, the soldier's friend.

Modern Royal Annals are largely made up of "marriage and death and division," and laureates, unofficial as well as official, are largely concerned with the two former. The death of Prince Henry of Battenberg from fever incurred while on active service in Ashanti in 1896 enabled _Punch_ to pay decorous and not extravagant homage to the "servant of duty." He had a much better theme in the death of the Prince's brilliant and ill-starred brother Alexander, in 1893, and the verses are not unworthy of one who was too great a gentleman to be a successful adventurer:--

Europe's Prince Charming, lion-like, born to dare,
Betrayed by the black treacherous Northern Bear!
Soldier successful vainly, patriot foiled,
Wooer discomfited, and hero spoiled!
Triumphant champion of Slivnitza's field,
To sordid treachery yet doomed to yield.
An age more chivalrous you should have seen,
When brutal brokers, and when bagmen keen
Shamed not the sword and blunted not the lance.
Then had you been true Hero of Romance.

The coronation of the Tsar Nicholas in 1896 is chronicled in the cartoon in which Peace says to him: "I was your father's friend--let me be yours," and his visit to Balmoral suggests another variation on the same theme. Under the heading "Blessed are the Peacemakers," Nicholas is seen taking an affectionate farewell of the Queen. Ten years later _Punch_ was to realize how vain were the dreams of good will when hampered by infirmity of purpose. For the moment, however, the pleasures and pastimes of Royalty were more in evidence. The Prince of Wales was alleged to have taken to bicycling, and _Punch_, still wedded to an old habit, proposed the new title of "the Prince of Wheels." The Prince is also congratulated on winning his first Derby with Persimmon, and encouraged to pay no attention to the Nonconformist stalwarts of Rochdale and Heywood who had begged him to abandon racing and withdraw from the turf. When Princess Maud of Wales was married to Prince Charles of Denmark, _Punch_ was not content with a loyal cartoon and a suitable Shakespearean quotation. He seized the opportunity to combine humanitarianism with allegiance to the throne by issuing a Plea for the Birds to the Women of England--begging them to discontinue the wearing of egret plumes on this and every other occasion.

[Sidenote: _Jubilee Tributes_]

Tributes to the Queen in the year of her Diamond Jubilee are unqualified in their admiration. Perhaps the most hearty and impressive, if not the most polished, is the "Song Imperial" printed in June:--

Stand up England, land of toil and duty,
In your smoking cities, in your hamlets green;
Stand up England, land of love and beauty,
Stand up, shout out, God save the Queen!

Stand up Scotland, up Wales and Ireland,
Loyal to her royalty, crowd upon the scene;
Stand up, all of us, we who are the sire-land,
Stand up, shout out, God save the Queen!

Stand up ye Colonies, the joy-cry reaches you,
Near lands, far lands, lands that lie between;
Where the sun bronzes you, where the frost bleaches you,
Stand up, shout out, God save the Queen!

Stand up all! Yes, princes, nobles, peoples,
All the mighty Empire--mightier ne'er hath been;
Boom from your decks and towers, clang from all your steeples
God save Victoria, God save the Queen!

Why not? Has she not ever loved and served us,
Royal to us, loyal to us, gracious ever been?
Ne'er in peace betrayed us, ne'er in war unnerv'd us;
Up, then, shout out, God save the Queen!

But now our sun descends, from the zenith westward,
Westward and downward, of all mortals seen;
Yet may the long day lengthen, though the fall be rest-ward,
May we long together cry, God save the Queen!

When in the coming-time, 'neath the dim ocean line,
Our dear sun shall sink in the wave serene,
Tears will fill these eyes of mine, tears will fill those eyes of thine,
Lowly kneeling, all will pray, God save the Queen!

In his "Jubilee Celebrator's _Vade Mecum_" _Punch_ did not spare criticism of the arrangements and the profiteering of speculators in seats. Yet with all deductions and drawbacks the Jubilee "was a gigantic success, for it has shown that a quarter of the world loves and appreciates a blameless Queen, and rejoices to be her subjects." The visit of the Duke and Duchess of York to Ireland in July prompts the usual cartoon attributing to Erin the familiar suggestion of a Royal residence in Ireland, a cure for discontent which _Punch_ was never weary of prescribing. Queen Victoria's eightieth birthday fell in 1899, and in the same number in which _Punch_ welcomes the anniversary he indulges in an unflattering pictorial comment on "Imperial Bruin" breathing forth compliments and pacific professions while carrying on dangerous intrigues in the Far East. Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, had renounced the succession to the Dukedom of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in the lifetime of his brother, the Duke of Edinburgh, who had succeeded to the title in 1893. _Punch_ in 1899 congratulated the Duke of Connaught on a decision the wisdom of which was amply justified in the sequel. Here _Punch_ made no claims to prophecy: he merely showed the Duke of Connaught waving aside the proffered honour and gave as his motto Gilbert's often-quoted lines:--

In spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman.

_Punch's_ lines on the death of the Duke of Edinburgh in the following year attain to a positively "lapidary" excellence in their discretion and brevity:--

Summoned to lordship in a stranger land,
He left his English birthright of the main,
Now, swiftly touched by Death's restoring hand,
He is the Queen's again.

The cartoon which linked Italy with Britannia as "Sisters in Sorrow"--King Humbert had been assassinated two days before the death of the Duke of Edinburgh--strikes the ceremonial and conventional note avoided in the epitaph quoted above, and noticeable in the cartoon prompted by the Queen's visit to Ireland earlier in the year.

(Wishing "Godspeed" to the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, who are starting for Australia.)]

To 1900 also belongs the first appearance in a _Punch_ cartoon of the ex-Crown Prince of Germany. In consonance with German Court tradition he was now about to learn a trade, and as his tastes were said to lie in the direction of typography, _Punch_ offers to take him on as a printing apprentice.

I have spoken elsewhere of the death of Queen Victoria in 1901; for it was a great deal more than an event in Court history; it marked the end of an era. _Punch_, in a commemorative number, reprinted a great many of his cartoons, good and bad, but omitting the disparaging or satirical pictures to which reference has been made in previous volumes; but even with this limitation, the collection is a valuable contribution to the pictorial history of our times. In discussing the National Memorial _Punch_ makes Art express the pious hope that London will get something worthy of a great city and a great Queen, and, as we have seen, in later years he acknowledged that she had done so. The start of the Duke and Duchess of York for their visit to Australia in March forms the theme of the pleasant fantasy reproduced on the preceding page.

In August the Empress Frederick of Germany, the most highly placed, the most gifted, and the most ill-starred of the Queen's daughters, followed her mother to the grave. Here _Punch's_ tribute, in which Germany and England figure as chief mourners, does not represent the hard facts, and overlooks the bitter antagonism of Bismarck to "the Liberal English woman," as he called her, her failure to inspire affection in the German nation, and the estrangement of her meteoric son. But _Punch's_ attitude was natural, for the Kaiser's visit to Osborne during Queen Victoria's last illness had touched the heart of England; and the description of the Empress Frederick as "gentle, brave and wise" was a venial misreading of the character of one whose fortitude, intrepidity and intellectual gifts were beyond question, but whose individuality was too pronounced to accommodate itself to her political surroundings.

(After the well-known picture by Velazquez in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. With _Mr. Punch's_ respectful congratulations to their Majesties of Spain.)]

[Sidenote: _Coronation Humours_]

The preparations for the crowning of King Edward furnished _Punch_ with material for a display of abundant good will to the Sovereign, tempered by an explosion of irresponsible frivolity. In the "Overflow Fête," designed by _Punch_ as "Bouverie King of Arms," he seized the opportunity of making game of all his favourite butts. A court of "overflow claims" considers the applications of Lord Halsbury, Sir J. Blundell Maple, Mr. Gibson Bowles, "Brer Fuchs" (Emil Fuchs, an Austrian artist much in Court favour but heavily derided by art critics), Mr. G. B. Shaw, Mr. Alfred Austin the Poet Laureate, and many others. Most of their alleged claims are declined, but a few exceptions are made, as, for example, that in favour of Mr. G. R. Sims being allowed to supply the fountains in Trafalgar Square with "Tatcho." A procession of emblematic cars is mainly satirical, and includes a "sleeping car" typical of British industry. The programme of the Gala Performance at the National Opera House introduces Dan Leno, and includes a masque of "Poets in Hades" on the lines of the Frogs of Aristophanes. _Punch_ also added what purported to be an Official Coronation Ode by Mr. Alfred Austin--a masterpiece of deliberate ineptitude--and a "Chantey of the Nations" in which Mr. Rudyard Kipling's imperialism is burlesqued in none too friendly a spirit. _Punch_ provided a jocular epilogue to the masque: he also dedicated a set of serious verses to the King wishing him

health and years' increase,
Wisdom to keep his people's love,
And, other earthly gifts above,
The long-desired, the gift of Peace.

The King is also hailed in a hunting picture as the "King of Sportsmen"; and the grace and kindliness of Queen Alexandra, now as ever, appealed to _Punch's_ chivalry. The dominant "note" sounded in _Punch's_ pages is one of jocularity and good humour. He reproduces the statement that "no fewer than 1,047 poets have sent in Coronation Odes for the prizes offered by _Good Words_"--no longer, it need hardly be added, the _Good Words_ of Norman Macleod. American visitors are maliciously pictured as attempting to buy coronets; and _Punch_ makes great play with the official announcement of the amount of space allotted to peeresses in the Abbey. Duchesses were to have eighteen inches and ladies of inferior rank sixteen; what was wanted, in _Punch's_ phrase, was "A Contractor for the Aristocracy."

[Sidenote: _Death of King Edward_]

The sudden and dangerous illness of the King and the postponement of the Coronation turned all this gaiety to gloom and suspense, happily relieved by a recovery which gave the celebrations, when they were held, the quality of a thanksgiving as well as of a great pageant.

In 1903 the King and Queen visited Ireland, and _Punch_ prefaced his Donnybrook Fair rhymes--a long way after Thackeray--on their entry into Dublin with the audacious but impenitent declaration that he intended to adhere to a method of spelling which bore no sort of resemblance to Irish pronunciation.

Of all the Royal visitors in the years before the war, none was more popular or "had a better Press" than King Alfonso. In 1905 _Punch_ happily contrasted past and present in his cartoon of the Kings of England and Spain in friendly converse, while in the background the formidable shade of Queen Elizabeth remarks with more of amazement than approval: "Odds my life! A King of Spain in England! And right cousinly entreated withal!" King Alfonso's marriage in the following year to Princess Ena of Battenberg is genially commemorated in Sambourne's happy adaptation of Velazquez; and when the infant Prince of the Asturias made his first visit to England, the same artist gave us the wholly delightful picture of Prince Olaf of Denmark pushing the Spanish princelet in his "pram": "Come along, old man," he says; "I'll show you round. I've been here before." Spain was not a royal bed of roses, but it was at least spared the upheaval which convulsed the adjoining kingdom of Portugal. On the assassination of King Carlos and the Crown Prince in 1908, Britannia in _Punch's_ cartoon bade King Manoel take courage: when he was deposed by the Revolution of 1910, he appears as a dignified figure mournfully bewailing the downfall of his House. Simultaneously _Punch_ chronicles the saying attributed to the late Mlle. Gaby Deslys: "I am not ashamed of having the friendship of young King Manoel," and ironically describes it as "the humility of true greatness."

King Edward was born in the same year in which _Punch_ first appeared, and when he died in 1910 the commemorative number goes back to the cartoon of "The First Tooth," published at a time when _Punch's_ comments on the Royal Nursery were more frank than decorous. But whether as a small boy or an Oxford undergraduate, in America or India, in illness or in health, as Prince or King, he had always found a benevolent friend and lenient critic in _Punch_, who now saluted him in death, in the name of Europe, as a Maker of Peace.

To the mass of obituary literature, mostly uncritical, which was inspired by the passing of a great and popular personality _Punch_ contributed an interesting fact. There was nothing surprising in the statement that King Edward never joined in debate in the House of Lords; but it was curious to learn that he never voted--except for the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill. The King's affection for his little dog Cæsar was one of those personal traits which had moved the popular sentiment, and _Punch_ was fortunate in having on his staff a writer who was a poet as well as a lover of dogs:--

Reft of your master, little dog forlorn,
To one dear mistress you shall now be sworn,
And in her queenly service you shall dwell,
At rest with one who loved your master well.

And she, that gentle lady, shall control
The faithful Kingdom of a true dog's soul,
And for the past's dear sake shall still defend
Cæsar, the dead King's humble little friend.

Evidence of the unabated popularity of King Alfonso continue to appear in 1910, when that sovereign's visit to the Duke of Westminster prompted some frivolous rhymes on "the Merry Monarch":--

Oh, why does Eaton all her banners don so?
To feast the roving eyes of King Alfonso.

Why was it that the sun last Wednesday shone so?
It loved the polo feats of King Alfonso.

What spectacle delights the footman John so?
The riding-breeches worn by King Alfonso.

What is it fascinates the Eatonian bonne so?
It is the winning ways of King Alfonso.

What puffs the plumage of the ducal swans so?
The notice they receive from King Alfonso.

Why are the Kaiser's courtiers jumped upon so?
He's sick with jealousy of King Alfonso.

Why does the British Press keep on and on so?
It cannot have enough of King Alfonso.

[Sidenote: _Kaiser, King, and Laureate_]

The mention of the Kaiser is ominous. _Punch_ had, for reasons mentioned above, given him a brief respite, but one of his periodical outbursts at Königsberg in August, 1910, provoked a cartoon representing the Imperial Eagle re-entering his cage "Constitution" to the relief of his keeper, whom he reassures with the remark: "It's all right: I'm going back of my own accord. But (_aside_) I got pretty near the sky that time. Haven't had such a day out for two years." This was not exactly respectful treatment, but it was not so frank as _Punch's_ heading "Thank Goodness!" prefixed ten years earlier to the statement made, by an American paper, that in a Boston Lunatic Asylum there were eleven patients, each of whom believed himself to be the German Emperor, but that they had no means of communicating with the outer world.

King George's coronation in 1911 gave _Punch_ another occasion for mingling jest with earnest, loyalty to the Sovereign with chaff of notorieties. The King's serious concern with his country's welfare had already been illustrated in the cartoon in which he is seen, like his namesake saint, attacking a dragon--that of "Apathy." At the time of the coronation _Punch_ lays stress on the heritage of sea-power that had fallen to him, a sailor prince. In July the Prince of Wales was welcomed in his Principality--this time, in _Punch's_ picture, by a dragon the reverse of apathetic.

In June, 1913, the office of Laureate fell vacant by the death of Mr. Alfred Austin. After Southey, Wordsworth and Tennyson, the anti-climax had been so painful that _Punch_ may well be excused for the cartoon in which Pegasus appeals to Ringmaster Asquith to disestablish him: the Steed of the Muses was tired of being harnessed to the Royal Circus. There are some who think that, in the best interests of the distinguished author who was appointed, it would have been well if _Punch's_ advice had been followed.

VANITY FAIR

In the fifty years that had passed since _Punch's_ birth in 1841, "Society," as it was then understood, had undergone a revolution which not only changed its structure but altered the meaning of the word. It had, in Mr. A. B. Walkley's phrase, become one of those "discoloured" words like "respectable" and "genteel," in which the new "connotation" strove with and gradually supplanted the old. "Society," in the old limited sense, stood for a limited, exclusive and predominantly aristocratic set, arrogant at times, but not wanting in a certain self-respect. But by the 'nineties it had become amorphous, unwieldy, cosmopolitan and plutocratic. Du Maurier, the finest and best equipped of the commentators and critics of the old _régime_, who recognized its distinction and its drawbacks, and satirized with impartial ridicule decadent aristocrats and vulgar intruders, was perhaps _felix opportunitate mortis_:--

He brought from two great lands the best of both
In one fine nature blent.
Lover of English strength and Gallic grace,
Of British beauty, or of soul or face,
Yet with that subtler something born of race
That charm to cleanness lent.

A Thackeray of the pencil! So men said.
His reverence high for the great Titan dead
Put by such praise with ease;
But social satire of the subtler sort
Was his, too. Not the shop, the slum, the court,
But gay saloons gave quarry for his sport.
'Twas in such scenes as these

His hectoring Midas, and his high-nosed earl,
His worldly matron, and his winsome girl,
Were found, and pictured clear,
With skill creative and with strength restrained.
They live, his butts, cold-hearted, shallow-brained.
In his own chosen walk Du Maurier reigned
Supreme, without a peer.

[Sidenote: _The Social Jungle_]

The tribute was fully earned; but Du Maurier was not one of those who enjoyed plying the scourge, and he was fortunate in that he did not live to see the "Gay Saloon" turned into the Social Jungle, as foreshadowed in _Punch's_ adaptation of Mr. Kipling's poem in 1894, which ends with the couplet:--

Because of his age and his cunning, his grip and
his power of jaw,
In all that the Law leaveth open the word of King
Mammon is Law.

For "Wolf" read "Worldling" for "Jungle" read "Social World" and _Punch's_ parallel "Laws" work out well enough. But in the years that followed it was not so much mammon-worship as the craze for excitement at all costs that dominated the fashionable world. The vulgarity and love of the limelight which Du Maurier had satirized were multiplied tenfold. Society became a romp and a ramp. England began to go dancing-mad in the 'nineties, but the harmless rowdiness of Kitchen Lancers, of the "Barn-dance" and the "Washington Post" developed in the new century into a mania for which historians found a parallel in the "Tarantism" of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We passed through various and mostly distressing phases of the malady from the days of Loie Fuller's serpentine contortions to the introduction of the "Salome" dance by Miss Maud Allan. Skirt-dancing, with a superabundance of skirts, gradually gave place to a style marked by the desire to dispense not only with skirts but with any sort of clothing. The wonderful performances of the Russian Ballet revealed a new world of art and "washed out" a good deal of highly advertised and indecorous incompetence, but in many ways proved a doubtful boon. The cult of the male dancer revived, and the triumphs of Pavlova and Karsavina lured the aristocratic amateur into futile and unseemly competition. This was only one of the many signs of the love of publicity which marked Society when it had ceased to be select. In the 'forties, when the _crême de la crême_ disported themselves at Cremorne, the Gardens were reserved for their exclusive use. Now, "smartness" was the note of Society, and "smartness" does not like to hide its light under a bushel. In the middle 'nineties _Punch_ registered his protest against ladies who begged publicly in the streets--the "merry half-sisters of charity," as he called them. By 1903 he indicated the spread of the new fashion in the ironical remark that "the eccentric habit of dining at home is, I regret to say, steadily spreading." The further course of this anti-domestic movement is correctly shown in the cartoon of Christmas _à la mode_ in 1908, when the butler of a modern English house inhospitably repels Father Christmas with: "Not at 'ome. Her Ladyship is at Monty Carlo; the young gentlemen are in the Halps; and Sir John has taken the other members of the family to the Restorong!" _Punch_ was not content with attacking the organized publicity of social life, with which may be connected his satire of the orgy of Pageants; he was equally vigorous in chastising its organized frivolity and horse-play; the extravagance of the week-end pleasure-hunt; the ostentatious folly of freak entertainments; and other excesses and eccentricities summed up in the two detestable phrases _fin de siècle_ and _de luxe_.

_Punch_ found no traces of a Golden Age in the 'nineties, though he admitted they were Yellow enough. For these were the years of the _Yellow Book_--alternately regarded as typical of _fin de siècle_ decadence (in _Punch's_ view) or as a symbol of literary renascence--of the now forgotten "emancipation novel," _The Yellow Aster_; to say nothing of the Yellow Peril and the Yellow Press. The _Daily Mail_, by the way, was not founded till 1896. As a social satirist _Punch_, throughout all this period, is much more concerned with the material or physical than the mental or spiritual vagaries of the rich and well-to-do. But a notable exception must be made in favour of that famous--or shall I say notorious?--coterie known as "the Souls," who are frequently referred to in 1893 and 1894. Readers anxious for "inside" information may be recommended to consult the _Autobiography_ of Mrs. Asquith, who was one of the number.

BUTLER OF MODERN ENGLISH HOME: "Not at ome. Her Ladyship is at Monty Carlo; the young gentlemen are in the Halps; and Sir John has taken the other members of the family to the Restorong."]

"Have you Browning's works?" "No, Miss. They're too difficult. People down here don't understand them." "Have you _Praed_?" "Prayed, Miss? Oh, yes; we've tried that, but it's no use!"]

[Sidenote: _The "Souls"_]

They were most of them highly born and highly gifted. Some afterwards attained eminence in politics and literature; and it must be admitted that they were clever enough to get themselves a great deal talked about without deliberately courting publicity at the time. Their audacities and unconventionalities enjoyed a considerable reputation, but did not often get into the papers. _Punch_ was obviously "intrigued" about them, but ingeniously disguised his curiosity by passing it on to an imaginary American visitor, "high-toned" (the word "high-brow" was a later importation) and inquiring, who came over to study our "Institootions"--Mr. Gladstone also used to pronounce it that way--and wrote down his impressions for a work on _Social Dry Rot in Europe_. So, hearing vague talk of a secret moral institution, the Society of Souls, he set to work to collect authentic information about them, but was everywhere baffled. The nearer he got to the shrine, the more negative and mysterious was the information vouchsafed. But the Philistine view is well burlesqued in his conversation with a fashionable lady who described the Souls as "a horrid stuck-up set of people who did all sorts of horrid things, all read the same books at the same time, sacrificed wild asses at the altar of Ibsen, the Hyperborean Apollo, and were bound by a rule that no Soul might ever marry another Soul." A year or so later _Punch_ noted the report that the Souls had ceased to exist, and would be replaced by a new club--the "No Bodies"--of which the membership would be unlimited. Still the Souls had had their day and, as representing an effort to establish an exclusive social coterie to which intellect or wit formed the chief passport, demand at least a passing word. The satire of fashionable culture dies down and is never very seriously revived even in the days when the late Emil Reich lectured on Plato at Claridge's. "Smart" Society was more active with its heels than with its head or its heart.

_Punch_ distrusted the sincerity of fashionable ladies who professed a desire to "elevate the masses" by organizing entertainments which were a hotch-potch of Ibsen, skirt-dancing, exotic sentiment and frank vulgarity. He waxes sarcastic, again, over charitable bazaars, run by women who didn't enjoy them, for causes of which they knew nothing and cared less. Frivolity was the thing that mattered. In the "Letters to a Débutante" which appeared in 1894 _Punch_ assumes the _rôle_ of the cynical mentor, e.g. "It is hardly possible to exaggerate the unimportance of nearly everything that happens": "Laugh when you're thinking what to say. It saves time." In weighing the rival merits of a group of suitors, the preference is given to the rich German-Jew. The decay of ballroom manners was an old subject of complaint with _Punch_, but it was never so persistently harped upon as during the years which began with the Barn-dance and ended with the Bunny-hug. In 1894, _à propos_ of the exuberant agility of a middle-aged Mænad, an old lady in one of Du Maurier's pictures observes that the "Pas de Quatre" should be "Pas du Tout" for Aunt Jane. The "Romping Lancers" are also noted, and in "Association v. Rugby" a breathless young lady beseeches her partner--a famous Rugby half-back--to dance "Soccer" for a little. In 1896, under the heading "The Death of the Dance," _Punch_ takes for his text the remark of a speaker at a recent meeting of the British Association of Teachers of Dancing: "I had rather be old and teach deportment than be young and teach people to romp the Barn-dance"; and he bewails the conversion of the once "light fantastic" into heavy prancing, spasmodic antics, and the general decay of elegance and grace. The arrival in 1897 of "The Washington Post" is greeted with ironical approval: "You take hold of a girl by both hands, try a double shuffle, and then slide off to another part of the room and repeat the performance." In 1898 the lines on "The Lost Art" are based upon the statement made by a provincial mayor that the risk of injury was rather greater in the ballroom than in the football field:--

[Sidenote: _Ball-room Manners_]

Oh! for the days when there were dancers!
Oh! for the mazes of the Lancers!
With what a nimble step elastic
We tripped it on the light fantastic,
With a sweet charm which now is not,
Through gay cotillion or gavotte,
Or, with a grace more regal yet,
We stepped a stately minuet,
Each man of us a choice assortment
Of Turveydropian deportment.

But where is now your ancient pomp?
Your dance is but a vulgar romp,
Your shocking "Barns" and "Posts"--oh, fie!
You only think of kicking high.
The men career _sans_ time, _sans_ rhythm,
The girls rush helter-skelter with 'em,
They charge, they trample on one's toes,
Their elbows hit one on the nose,
They black one's eyes, still on they come,
They butt one in the back and stom--
I mean the waistcoat, till the hall
Is more like battlefield than ball.

I'd rather serve in the Soudan,
I'd rather fight at Omdurman,
I'd rather quarrel with a chum,
I'd rather face a Rugby scrum,
Nay, by the stars, I'd rather be
That hapless wretch, the referee,
Most desperate of men, than chance
My life and limbs at modern dance.

In 1906 the introduction of the "Boston" waltz prompts one of _Punch's_ artists to depict the sad experience of a young lady whose partners had all learned the new dance from American instructors, and who all danced it in a different way. The band, by the way, is playing "The Blue Danube," for Johann Strauss was still a name to conjure with. References to rowdy dancing are frequent in 1907, when _Punch_ printed designs of various costumes to resist the tremendous wear-and-tear of the ballroom, and in 1908, when he suggests, to meet a "long felt want," that a special space should be railed off for "plungers." _Punch's_ picture of the "Borston" as danced in 1909 belies the ironical title "The Poetry of Motion." Long tight skirts were still worn and are a feature of the series of suggestions, made in the same year, by Mr. Baumer for brightening our ballrooms--the Judy-walk, the Apache Polka, the Salome Lancers and the Vampire Valse. That same acute observer of gilded (and painted) youth includes in his burlesque Coronation Procession in 1911 a member of the aristocracy in the guise of a caracoling Bacchante; and in the same year the male dancer craze is satirized in a series of pictures showing the spread of the infection to policemen, railway porters, scavengers, ticket collectors, etc. The revival of old English dances dates from this period, but if _Punch_ is to be trusted, made little impression on Mayfair. Even the most distinguished and eminent politicians did not scorn the dance. Mr. Balfour gave a ball at the height of the season in 1912, and _Punch_ (who was not there) gave the following wholly apocryphal description of the revels:--

ARTHUR'S BALL

When Parliament, sick with unreason,
Was occupied, night after night,
With bandying charges of treason,
And challenging Ulster to fight,
To ease the political tension
Prince Arthur determined to call
A truce to this deadly dissension
By giving a Ball.

The guests were by no means confined to
The ranks of the old Upper Ten,
For Arthur has always inclined to
Consort with all manner of men;
So the brainy, though lacking in breeding,
Were bidden as well as the fops;
The foes of carnivorous feeding,
And lovers of chops.

There were golfers from Troon and Kilspindie
Discussing their favourite greens;
Bronzed soldiers from Quetta and Pindi;
Pale pilots of flying-machines;
There were débutantes visibly flustered,
Calm beauties from over the "Pond";
Sleek magnates of soap and of mustard,
And Brunner and Mond.

* * * * *

I saw a delectable Duchess
Sit out with a Syndicalist,
And a battle-scarred soldier on crutches
Hob-nob with a Pacificist;
And a famous professor of Psychics--
A Scot who was reared at Dunkeld--
Indulge in the highest of high kicks
I ever beheld.

Lord Haldane, whose massive proportions
Were gracefully garbed in a kilt,
Performed the most daring contortions
With true Caledonian lilt;
Lord Morley resembled a Gracchus;
Lloyd George was a genial Jack Cade,
And Elibank, beaming like Bacchus,
The revels surveyed.

The music was subtly compounded
Of melodies famous of yore,
And measures that richly abounded
In modern cacophonous lore;
There was Strauss, the adored of Vienna,
The genius of joyous unrest,
And Strauss, who the shrieks of Gehenna
Contrives to suggest.

I'd like to describe, but I canna,
The envy combined with dismay
Aroused by adorable Anna
Whom several Kingdoms obey.
Her entry produced quite a crisis--
Some prudes were surprised she was axed--
She appeared in the costume of Isis
According to Bakst.

It was four of the clock ere I quitted
These scenes of eclectic delight;
The fogies had most of them flitted,
The revels were still at their height;
For Garvin was dancing a Tango,
His head in the place of his legs;
And Spender a blameless fandango
Encircled by eggs.

What incidents happened thereafter
I only can dimly surmise:
But gusts of ecstatical laughter
Went echoing up to the skies;
And I know from my own observation
The guests were agreed, one and all,
That Arthur united the nation
By giving this Ball.

The "Borston"]

[Sidenote: _Tango-mania_]

The mention of Anna--the famous Pavlova--was at any rate topical, for the cult of the Russian Ballet was now at its height, and in his Almanack for 1913 _Punch_ exhibited the political and other public celebrities of the hour engaged in appropriate evolutions _à la Russe_. The "Bunny-hug" was very properly gibbeted in a scathing cartoon, and in his hints to social climbers _Punch_ suggests various styles of vulgar and inane dancing as a passport to notoriety. With laudable fairness he admits, in parallel illustrations, that the Tango of fact was a much less lurid thing than the Tango as painted by the fancy of Puritans; but the revival of afternoon dances and the fashion of "Tango teas" met with no approval, and in the cartoon "Exit Tango," early in 1914, _Punch_, rather prematurely perhaps, congratulated the "Spirit of Dancing" on the passing of "the tyranny of the dullest of nightmares."

In one of the last of the references to the dancing craze in this period--February, 1914, to be precise--_Punch_ notes, as one of the reasons why the Tango was already _démodé_, the fact that matrons had taken to it with the utmost fury, after a preliminary stage of acute disapproval. In the words of one of the younger generation:--

Now we may watch our mothers, smiling and flushed and gay,
Doing it, doing it, doing it--tangoing night and day.

Stamping a Texas Tommy, wreathing a Grapevine Swirl,
Gleefully Gaby Gliding, young as the youngest girl.

We may not laugh at our mothers, for (between me and you)
They can out-dance us often--get all our partners too.

MODERN YOUTH (to Terpsichore): "My hug, I think." MR. PUNCH: "My kick, I know!"]

[Sidenote: _Matron v. Maid_]

This, however, was no new thing. It was only the latest manifestation of a "movement" which runs right through the social history of the whole of this period, and which may be alternatively described as the Emancipation or the Apotheosis of Middle Age. The earliest references to the change link it up with the coming of the New Woman. For example, in 1894, in a "Song of the Twentieth Century," _Punch_ describes the man of the family as relegated to the shelf by his more energetic female relatives:--

Aunt Jane is a popular preacher,
Aunt Susan a dealer in stocks,
While Father, the gentlest old creature,
Attends to the family socks.

But as time goes on it is in the pursuit of pleasure rather than in the sphere of serious effort that the competition of the middle-aged woman is noted as a new and formidable sign of the times. Thus in 1895 we have Du Maurier's picture of the Sunday caller finding that the mother of the family is playing lawn tennis while the young ladies have gone to church. By 1900 the youthfulness of the older generation is made a source of complaint by the juniors. In "Filia Pulchra, Mater Pulchrior," _Punch_ genially arraigns the mothers who "cut out" their daughters. A paper for ladies had declared that the woman of forty was most dangerous to the susceptible male, and _Punch_ enlarges on the theme in "The Rivals," in which an eligible suitor exclaims, "Take, oh take Mamma away!" In 1903 he recurs ironically to the subject in the lines "De Senectute":--

However pedagogues may frown
And view such dicta with disfavour,
The folk who never sober down
Confer on life its saltiest savour.

The grandmother who wears a cap
Incurs her family's displeasure;
But if she sets a booby-trap
And wears a fringe, she is a treasure.

The old ideal of growing old gracefully had been superseded by a refusal to grow old at all; and the "unfair competition" of matron with maid is pointedly illustrated in _Punch's_ "Country House Hints" in 1908, where, after giving information about tips, dresses, etc., the writer observes that girls are at a discount as guests: "they are not rich enough for Bridge, and they put a restriction on funny stories." They may have done so fourteen years ago; but only a year later, in a burlesque article based on the fulsome Society paragraphs of the contemporary Press, _Punch_ made it clear that the process of emancipation was proceeding apace:--

Wise mothers--and modern mothers are seldom wanting in astuteness--do
not keep their young "flapper" daughters buried in the schoolroom
until the day of presentation. They prepare them for their complete
emancipation by a series of preliminary canters. Thus they take them
to dine at the Fitz or the Tarlton while the hair that is hanging down
their backs is still their own....

The upbringing of Lady Sarah Boodle has been wholly unconventional,
and as her parents spend most of their time in balloons, she is
looking forward to her first season with all the _fougue de dix-huit
ans_. Until she was sixteen Lady Sarah was allowed to read nothing but
the _Sporting Times_ and the _Statist_. This led, not unnaturally,
to a violent reaction, and Lady Sarah is now a devoted student
of Maeterlinck, Mr. W. B. Yeats and Fiona Macleod. Happily this
development has not impaired her healthy enjoyment of Bridge. Last
year she won £300 at this winsome pastime.... One may fitly conclude
this group of winsome English girls with the mention of two beautiful
cousins, Lady Phoebe Bunting and Miss Miriam Belshazzar. By an
extraordinary coincidence they are both third cousins once removed of
Daphne, Lady Saxthorpe, whose coster impersonations were so marked a
feature of her late husband's tenure of office as Governor of Hong
Kong. Lady Phoebe, strange to say, never learned her alphabet until
she was nearly fifteen, while her cousin had mastered the intricacies
of compound interest almost before she could walk. Lady Phoebe
is a winsome blonde, while Miss Belshazzar is a _svelte_ brunette
whose superb Semitic profile recalls the delicious proboscis of her
illustrious grandfather, Sir Joshua Schnabelheimer.

[Sidenote: _Ostentatious Luxury_]

Extravagant expense and ostentation--another old abomination of _Punch's_--were not only rife, but they were constantly written up and discussed with a foolish voice of praise in what purported to be democratic papers. A ducal wedding in the mid-'nineties, which was carefully "rehearsed" before it was actually solemnized, caused a veritable explosion in _Punch_ about the columns of matrimonial gush and statistics--the "haystacks of chrysanthemums"--which deluged the papers. In the picture of coroneted sandwichmen engaged by adroit speculators to puff their schemes, _Punch_ in 1897 was only repeating an old indictment of parasitic peers. He had no quarrel with people who took to trade openly and seriously, disregarding the old fine-drawn social distinctions and contempt for commerce--witness his song of "The English Gentleman of the Present Day" in 1899. But he had no welcome for the newfangled newspaper articles on gastronomy, with _menus_ and prices, puffing well-known hotels and restaurants. The statement of a writer in _The Times_ in 1900 that "the necessaries of life may be purchased for £2,000 a year" provided _Punch_ with food for ironical comment. A year later it was seriously maintained in a popular monthly that, from the point of view of a smart Society woman, it was impossible to _dress_ on £1,000 a year. The standard of high living had gone up by leaps and bounds from the days when to _Punch's_ youthful fancy £1,000 a year represented wealth almost beyond the dreams of avarice.

Another old grievance--needless extravagance in the Army--raised its head in 1900, when a correspondent in _The Times_ complained that the latest regulations issued by the War Office were like a tailor's list, and contained details of seventy-seven kinds of gold lace! No wonder was it, as _Punch_ noted, that the fathers of subalterns in crack regiments had to guarantee them a minimum allowance of £600 a year. This was just before the South African war, which immediately led to a general rise of prices--the universal excuse "owing to the war" foreshadowing what took place fifteen years later. Parallels abound, though on a smaller scale. Marriage is ironically declared to be impossible for self-respecting and self-protective girls owing to the dearth of servants. "Like the Dodo, the domestic servant is extinct," and _Punch_, in his list of suggested exhibits for museums, includes the following:--

_Domestic Servant_ (Mummy).--An extremely rare and finely preserved
specimen of a vanished class, whose extinction dates from 1901
A.D. It is therefore of the highest interest to the
Anthropologist and the Comparative Anatomist. Its duties are now
performed, perhaps more effectively, by the automatic "general" and
the electric dumb-waiter. When alive, it commanded the salary of a
prima donna, etc.

Aversion from work was already abroad. A fond parent is shown in this year commenting on the recalcitrant attitude of her daughter: "No, she won't work. She never would work. She never will work. There's only one thing--she'll 'ave to go out to service."

Still "smart" Society went on its way unheeding. The increasing publicity of social life is satirized under "Public Passion" in the recital of a young wife who writes: "We are _never_ at home. I believe it is fashionable to go to hospitals now and be ill amongst all sorts and conditions of people." The honeymoon was passing because brides could not face the awful loneliness of a _tête-à-tête_ existence, and welcomed a speedy return to a semi-detached go-as-you-please existence amongst their friends. A week-end honeymoon at Brighton is indicated as the maximum period which could be endured by a modern couple. In fashionable speech inanity began to be replaced by profanity. Unbridled language on the part of aristocrats and smart people led in 1903 to the famous conversational opening of a burlesque Society novel: "'Hell!' said the Duchess, who had hitherto taken no part in the conversation"[7]--which _Punch_ takes as his text for a discourse upon further developments and reactions. The device of engineering and paying for personal notices in the papers and simultaneously denouncing the scandalous enterprise of pressmen, and the introduction of "freak" parties from America are noticed and reproved in 1903, when amongst other recreations of the Smart Set we read of "Shinty, a wild and tumultuous version of hockey, in which there are absolutely no rules."

[Footnote 7: The author of this much-quoted phrase was said to have been an Eton boy, but I have been unable to trace his name or subsequent career.]

[Sidenote: _The New Mobility_]

At the beginning of this period bicycling was fashionable. The lines "To Julia, Knight-errant" in 1895 refer in whimsical vein to the brief vogue of bicycling parties by night in the City, organized by "smart" people. Battersea Park was also frequented by fashionable riders; but _Punch_, with a sure instinct, saw that the craze would not last, and in the same year foreshadowed donkey-riding as the next modish recreation. The advent of "mokestrians" was a mere piece of burlesque, suggested perhaps by the popularity of the sentimental coster song introduced by Mr. Albert Chevalier, but the speedy disestablishment of the bicycle as a fashionable means of locomotion was correctly foretold in one of the latest pictures from the pen of Du Maurier. Here one of a group of fair bicyclists in the Park expresses her ardent desire for the passing of a tyranny which she hated and only obeyed because it was the fashion. Motoring was another matter, because it was expensive and luxurious, and _Punch_, philosophizing in 1904 on the probable results of a mode of motion which combined speed of transit with the immobility of the passenger, predicted the advent of an obese and voracious "motorocracy" with Gargantuan appetites and mediæval tastes. In a "Ballade of Modern Conversation" which appeared in 1905, the three outstanding topics are Bridge, motors and ailments, and about this time _Punch_ printed a picture of a gentleman who, when asked what was his favourite recreation, replied, "Indigestion."

FUTURE DUKE: "What are you goin' to do this mornin' eh?"

FUTURE EARL: "Oh, I dunno. Rot about, I s'pose, as usual."

FUTURE DUKE: "Oh, but I say, that's so rotten."

FUTURE EARL: "Well, what else is there to do, you rotter?"]

The influence and example of American millionaires is a frequent theme of satire. In 1904 _Punch_ had attacked their acquisitiveness in a burlesque account of the contemplated "bodily removal of certain European landscapes." In 1905 he dealt faithfully with a famous "freak" dinner at the Savoy Hotel, costing £600 a head, when the guests were entertained in a huge gondola and the courtyard was flooded to represent a Venetian lagoon. The American "enfant terrible" in 1907, frankly discussing her relations with her parents, supplies an interesting comment on the complexities of divorce, as described a few years earlier by the late Mr. Henry James in _What Maisie Knew_. The unemployment and inefficiency of the Upper Classes were admirably satirized in a set of Neo-Chaucerian verses, suggested by a society chronicler who had anticipated a March of the Upper Class unemployed to the East End. In 1906 the Pageant craze assumed formidable dimensions, and the ubiquitous activities of Mr. Louis Napoleon Parker as Pageant-master are duly if disrespectfully acknowledged. _Punch_ had never been enthusiastic about "dressing up"; it was, in his view, foreign to the temper of the British and essentially one of the things which they managed better abroad. Moreover, he regarded this preoccupation with the past as an evasion of our responsibilities to the future. This view is pointedly expressed in the cartoon "Living on Reputation" in 1908, where Britannia (among the Pageants) remarks: "Quite right of them to show pride in my past; but what worries me is that nobody seems to take any interest in my future." "Smart" people were furiously interested in the things of the present, and for the most part in the things that did not matter. From 1906 right up to the war no feature of the feverish pleasure-hunt indulged in by the idle rich escaped the vigilant eye of "Blanche," whose "Letters," when all allowance is made for a spice of exaggeration and for the wit which the author perhaps too generously ascribes to her puppets, remain a substantially faithful picture of the audacious frivolity, the inanity, the rowdiness and the extravagance of England _de luxe_, unashamed of its folly, yet, at its worst, never inhuman or even arrogant. I don't think that any of "Blanche's" set would have quitted a shooting party because he was asked to drink champagne out of a claret glass, as in the picture of the young super-snob in 1908.

[Sidenote: _Paint and "Pekies"_]

FIRST OWNER OF PRIZE DOGLET: "These seaside places don't appeal to me the least little bit. But Ozoneville was recommended to give tone to Choo-choo's nerves. He's been suffering from severe shock through seeing two fearful mongrels have a fight in the park one day. Your little thingy-thing's off colour too?"

SECOND OWNER OF PRIZE DOGLET: "Yes, a bit run down after the season. Sorry, but I really must hurry away. Band's beginning to play something of Balfe's, and I _never_ allow Ming-ming to hear banal _démodé_ music."]

Horse-play as an integral part of the modern idea of pleasure is satirized in 1910 in a series of suggestions for new "Side-shows" at Exhibitions, which should combine the maximum amount of motion, discomfort, and even danger to life and limb. The recrudescence of "beauty doctors" is noted by "Blanche" in the same year, and the increasing use of paint, not to repair the ravages of age, but to lend additional lustre to the bloom of youth, is faithfully recorded by _Punch's_ artists in the decade before the war. Bridge--to which _Punch_ had paid a negative homage on the ground that it kept the drawing-room ballad-monger and the parlour-tricksters at bay--had ousted whist, and in 1913 was threatened by "Coon-Can." On the cult of the "Peky-Peky" _Punch_ spoke with two voices, for while he deprecated the infatuation of their owners, he was fully alive to the charm, the intelligence, and the courage of these picturesque little Orientals.