It is this that we deeply deplore:
You were cast for a common or usual pig,
But you play the invincible bore.
As in his earlier tirades against the Æsthetes, Punch confounded all the contributors to the Yellow Book and the Savoy in one common anathema. The former, with an illustration by "Daubaway Weirdsley," and "Max" as "Max Mereboom," himself one of the finest literary parodists of our time, is held up in 1895 to especial ridicule. The Savoy in 1896 becomes "The Saveloy," with imaginary extracts and further attacks on Max Mereboom, Simple Symons, and Weirdsley; while in the same year in "The Chaunt of the Bodley Head" (after Praed's Chaunt of the Brazen Head) the Savoy School is condemned for its mephitic atmosphere. There was in the movement much deliberate eccentricity, much of the cant of anti-cant, which clamoured for robust satire, but Punch was more happily inspired in his ridicule of the popular and society novels of the time—in his parody of Sherlock Holmes, which was quite good enough for the original, and of Dodo, in which the rowdiness and pseudo-intellectuality of Mr. Benson's heroine are excellently hit off. It opens well with "'Sling me over a two-eyed steak, Bill,' said Bobo." In the sequel the Marquis of Cokaleek, the noble unappreciated husband, gets killed in the hunting field, but Bobo does not marry Bill, her fancy man. She jilts him and "got herself married to an Austrian Prince at half an hour's notice by the A. of C." Punch, let it be recorded, was responsible for the often quoted saying which appeared in 1894 that "the modern novel is a blend of the Erotic, the Neurotic and the Tommyrotic."
Esther Waters, compared and contrasted with Hardy's Tess, is pronounced in 1894 to be not "virginibus puerisque," and a once famous "emancipation novel," The Yellow Aster, by "Iota," long since hopelessly out-distanced in the reaction against reticence, becomes The Yellow Plaster, by "Iõpna," whose "She-notes" wild are amusingly travestied in the same year. The Yellow Aster and Key-Notes were pioneer efforts in the domain of the psychological novel, and the new jargon is ridiculed in such burlesque phrases as "the woman's voice came through the envelope of Margerine's subconsciousness, steely clear as a cheese-cutter." The vogue of The Green Carnation, a roman à clef which created some stir at the same time, is attested in Du Maurier's picture "How Opinion is Formed":—
He: "Have you read that beastly book The Mauve Peony by Lady Middlesex?"
She: "Yes, I rather liked it."
He: "So did I."
Unchristian Criticism of Hall Caine
Du Maurier's Trilby was naturally treated with benevolence, though Punch regretted the theological interludes, but The Sorrows of Satan is rudely dismissed as "a farrago of balderdash and vanity"; the egotism of the author and of Mr. Robert Buchanan in belabouring their detractors is severely rebuked; and Mr. Hall Caine's The Christian is recommended only as an absolute pis aller if you hadn't even a Bradshaw to read. This great work is also parodied as "The Heathen," with Alleluia Grouse and Luke Blizzard in the rôles of Glory Quayle and John Storm. There was still a spice of Bludyer in Punch, and on occasion he could act on the advice of a famous editor, "Be kind, be merciful, be gentle, but when you come across a silly fool, string him up." In later years, as the literary quality of his reviews improved, his clemency to the new-comers approached an uncritical tolerance.
The passing of the three-volume novel in 1894 is noted in a Ballade not untinged with regret, to judge from the "Envoi":—
Prince, writers' rights—forgive the pun—