Homer: "Look here, what does it matter which of you chaps wrote the other fellow's books? Goodness only knows how many wrote mine!"
(Nods, as usual, and exit.)
Shakespeare and Shaw
The last word has an academic ring, but Punch was probably thinking of George Meredith's use of it in a letter to The Times in 1877 when he spoke of those "whom Rabelais would have called agelasts or non-laughers."
A brilliant American essayist, Miss Agnes Repplier, has recently remarked that the Twentieth Century does not "lean to extravagant partialities" but rather to "disparagement, to searchlights, to that lavish candour which no man's reputation can sustain." In the pastime of hauling eminence down from its pinnacle she awards a pre-eminence to British critics. It cannot be said that Punch has taken an active hand in this game. Even Shakespeare had not been exempt from this "lavish candour." Mr. Bernard Shaw, writing in the Saturday Review in 1896, had said that "with the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare, when I measure my mind against his." Whether he really meant what he said is a question passing the wit of the plain person; but the utterance stung Punch into a rejoinder in the form of an imaginary interview with "G. B. S.," in which the criticism is further developed and obliquely ridiculed. Punch was equally sensitive where patronage of the bard suggested self-advertisement, and in 1901, in the "New Genius of Stratford-on-Avon," he expressed an ironical apprehension lest Miss Corelli might oust Shakespeare as the tutelary deity of that town. The Bacon-Shakespeare controversy was again becoming acute and claimed Punch's attention in 1902, when he published a cartoon bearing on the issue, and followed it up with a happy burlesque. As he argued, "If Bacon wrote Shakespeare's Plays, why, in the name of all that is biliteral, should not Shakespeare have written Bacon's Essays?" Hence the dissertation "Of Plays and their Authors," from which I may quote the concluding passages:—
It may be said of such an one that he is a man unlettered, having little Latin and of Greek no whit. How should he write plays? Whence hath he lore of law and medicine, of history and science? But there be handbooks. And a man may learn by enquiry of another, giving to him the price of half-a-pint. So shall the dramatist acquire such matters as be necessary, as the names of battles and of Kings and an imperfect understanding of legal phrases. Moreover, where no copyright is, he may steal freely from others, appropriating their plots and embellishing them.... Lastly to conclude this part, he that writeth dramas must endure with philosophy the investigations of talented ladies. Being of humble estate he must not murmur should his works be taken from him and given to a Lord Chancellor. Being himself sane he must bear with the lunatick fancies of others. And though his words be twisted into crazy anagrams, and his dramas be made a source of a scandal about Queen Elizabeth, he must not complain. Generally let the wise man ignore the bee that buzzeth in another's bonnet.
Punch's "Essay" is not without relevance in its bearing on the recent "invention" of that highly "talented lady" Miss Clemence Dane.
Punch on "R. L. S."
To repeat what I said in another volume, the highest qualities of the literary critic are revealed, not in his loyalty to established reputations so much as in his attitude to contemporary writers, in his ability to gauge the durability of their merits, and to distinguish a passing vogue from a sure title to remembrance. And there was certainly no lack of material on which to exercise these faculties in the 'nineties—romantic, realistic, and decadent. Punch had already welcomed Mr. Kipling and Sir James Barrie, and though his appreciation of the former varied considerably in the next fifteen years, admiration of his freshness and invention prevailed on the whole over distaste for his excursions into politics, his addiction to technicalities, slang and obscurity. The literary criticism of Punch was probably at its lowest ebb in 1893, when a review of Stevenson's Catriona is bracketed with a notice of Miss Corelli's Barabbas. Punch deals faithfully with the method of handling Holy Writ adopted in Barabbas, but contents himself with recommending Catriona to those who love Scots dialect, which he frankly confesses he does not.
When Stevenson died in his early prime in 1894, a very different temper inspired Punch's tribute to the Great Romancer:—