Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 3 of 4.—1874-1892. Graves Charles Larcom

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      Not this the hour to echo faction's cry

      Of half-exultant chiding, or to ply

      The Party-phraser's venomed word-lash. No!

      But laggard wills, counsels confused and slow

      Should need no sharper spur, no keener goad

      Than this to urge them on plain Honour's road.

      The Tragedy of Khartoum

      Punch's contribution to the Gordon "Memorial" was an ode from which we may quote one stanza: —

      Gordon! A name to gild our island story,

      Opulent yet in many a noble name,

      With lustre brighter than mere statecraft's fame,

      More radiant than the warrior's glittering glory.

      Such lesser lights eclipse them in the fine

      Sun-glow of selfless valour such as thine,

      Soldier whose sword, like Galahad's, was not used

      To hew out honour, but to champion right;

      Plan-shaper who, in council as in fight,

      Wast endlessly resourceful, yet refused,

      Death-snared, an easy flight!

      Other pens were busy over this episode, which inspired perhaps the most scarifying epigram of our times: —

      Judas despairing died, his guilt confessed,

      But had he lived in this our age and city,

      He surely would have figured with the best

      Upon a Christ Memorial Committee.

      The disaster, however, had one heartening result in the offer of military assistance from Canada, Victoria and New South Wales, duly recorded by Punch in his cartoon of the Lion and the Colonial cubs. The year 1885 had opened with a sinister display of activity by dynamiters, and Punch rebuked Sir William Harcourt for his alleged apathy and imperious resentment of criticism by calling him the "Not-at-Home Secretary." America promptly took legislative action, refusing sanctuary to dynamiters, and was loudly applauded, while Mr. Parnell, in Punch's opinion, missed a golden opportunity for disavowing and condemning these outrages. In "What Mr. Parnell might have said" Punch printed the speech which he did not make but ought to have made, "as a man, an Irishman and a Christian."

      Mrs. Gummidge-Gladstone: "I ain't what I could wish myself to be. My troubles has made me contrairy. I feel my troubles, and they make me contrairy. I make the house uncomfortable. I don't wonder at it!!!"

      John Peggotty-Bull (deeply sympathizing aside): "She's been thinking of the old 'un!" —David Copperfield.

      The days of the Gladstone administration were numbered, and the motion in favour of Proportional Representation excited but a languid and academic interest. Punch thought the system far too complicated, and sought to reduce it to absurdity by a practical illustration. He was much more serious in his resentment at the hectoring attitude of Bismarck à propos of a recent speech of the Imperial Chancellor. In "Lecturing a Lecturer – a Friendly Tip to the Teuton Titan," he showed Bismarck standing in a truculent pose before a map of Europe while Punch looks on in amusement. The point of the accompanying verses is that Britain was not to be scared or scolded into submission: —

      Orbilian Colossus,

      You'd chide us and spank us and goad us and toss us,

      But when Polyphemus world-wigging would try

      He may – pardon the argot– get "one in the eye."

      And Punch, Herr Professor, whose point seldom misses,

      Is ready if needful to play the Ulysses.

      The attempt to represent Bismarck as a professor might not seem to show a very acute reading of the facts were it not that German professors proved the chief inflamers of militarism. It must be added that, as a set off to this expostulation, Punch indited a remarkably genial poem to Bismarck a couple of weeks later on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. But this can hardly have atoned for the extremely acid and acute satire on the Spirit of German Colonization published about the same time. Here Germania declares her intentions to the native races in language which the treatment of the Herreros in German South-West Africa proved to be well within the mark: —

      I haf brought you German culture for the poddy and the mind,

      Die erhabene Kultur of efery sort and efery kind;

      All the pessimistic dogtrines of the Schopenhauer school

      And the blessings of a bureaucratish-military rule.

      I shall teach you shplendit knowledge, vot you hitherto haf lacked,

      That religion is a fantasy, vhilst sausage is a fact;

      Ja, the mysteries of sauerkraut to you shall be made clear,

      And your souls shall learn to float on foaming waves of Lager-Bier!

      I do not intend to long-while you mit missionary rant,

      But to brighten up your intellects mit Hegel and mit Kant.

      Mit our Army-Service system I'll begift you by-and-by,

      And mit all the priceless blessings of our Hohe Polizei.

      Ach! I lofes you as a moder, and your happiness, I shwear,

      Shall forefer be the von surpassing object of my care.

      I'll civilize you, Kinder, mid dem edlen Gerstenbrei,

      And mit discipline, Potztausend! – or I'll know the reason vhy!

      And then die hehre Göttin, hof'ring in the aether blue,

      Vill summon up her gunboats and her Pickelhauben too,

      Her bearded brawny varriors, vot nefer knew no fear,

      And troops of learned bureaucrats, all buttoned-up to here.

      Then if the shtupit natifes don't attend to vot she said,

      And makes themselves unpleasant, they must all be shooted dead;

      For trifles in the vay of German culture must not shtand —

      Hoch soll der Bismarck leben! I drinks, "Our Fatherland!"

      Lord Randolph Churchill

      When the Government was defeated in June "on the Budget Stakes," as Punch put it, he went so far as to accuse Gladstone of "riding to lose," and resented this action as not quite on the square. A month earlier he had shown Gladstone as the political Mrs. Gummidge, the "Old 'un" being Disraeli, whose portrait hangs on the wall. There was a rumour of Mr. Gladstone going to the Lords, and Punch had a picture of Tennyson, in his robes in the "gay garden of elegant earls," inviting W. E. G. to "come into the garden," but Mr. Gladstone declines, preferring to paddle his own canoe. Lord Randolph was included in the Salisbury administration, which held office for six months, as Secretary of State for India, but his elevation to Cabinet rank did not appease Punch's distrust – rather the reverse. He was not really an undersized man, but he invariably appears in Punch about this time as a boy, a mannikin or some diminutive pest, while the vehemence of his language is resented in bitter criticism of his "mud-spattering" abuse, vulgar invective, and "Billingsgate Babel." In particular a speech which he delivered at a Conservative gathering at Canford Manor, Wimborne, excited Punch's wrath, and prompted the picture of "Funny Little Randolph," as a "star comique" singing a topical song, "I don't care a rap," and exulting in his grimaces and bad manners. In the previous year Punch had fallen СКАЧАТЬ