Fin-de-siècle! Ah, that phrase, though taste spurn it, I
Fear, threatens staying with us to eternity.
Who will deliver
Our nerves, all a-quiver,
From that pest-term, and its fellow, "modernity"?
WHAT OUR ARTIST (THE INTENSELY PATRIOTIC ONE) HAS TO PUT UP WITH!
Just as he is pointing out to Monsieur Anatole Duclos, the Parisian journalist, how infinitely the English type of female beauty (especially amongst our Aristocracy) transcends that of France, or any other nation—who should come up from the beach but Lady Lucretia Longstaff and her five unmarried daughters!
—"And as for those idiotic old French caricatures of les Anglaises, with long gaunt faces and long protruding teeth and long flat feet—why, good heavens! my dear Duclos, the type doesn't even exist!"
Punch was much preoccupied with "modernity" and its numerous manifestations in these years, and his preoccupation took the form of a comprehensive series of "Modern Types," to which reference has already been made. Some of them will appear anything but modern to the Georgian reader, and, indeed, are not so much new as recurrent types—for example, the precocious undergraduate who gambles, drinks, fails in his schools, emigrates and dies miserably. The "Young Guardsman" is an eminently conventional portrait of a type which disappeared in the Great War, and is almost a libel on a Brigade whose social prestige is of infinitely less importance than its magnificent record of heroic achievement. The "Average Undergraduate" is in the main a handsome tribute to the public school system. He is not an Admirable Crichton, a Blue or a Scholar, but a decent fellow, truthful and ingenuous, who will always be a "useful member of the community." The tone of the whole series, however, is very far from ministering to national complacency. The bitterest of all these portraits is that of "The Adulated Clergyman," an effeminate, self-indulgent, insincere and unwholesome impostor, at all points a base variant of the type satirized in Thackeray's fashionable preacher, Charles Honeyman.