Upon the ways of Wonderland.
Magic, Megalomania, and Sham Culture
From this wonder world Punch turned to "le monde où l'on s'affiche" to castigate the methods of Mr. Hall Caine and Mr. Le Gallienne—the Manx megalomaniac and the Author-Lecturer—and to the realm of blameless banality ruled over by Sir John Lubbock. Sir John's genius for truisms had been guyed in 1894; in 1900 he appears in a special section of "The Book of Beauty" as the author of some enchanting platitudes, e.g. "A man's work will often survive him. Thus, Shakespeare and Watt are dead; but Hamlet and the steam engine survive."
This was the year of the appearance of Lady Randolph Churchill's Anglo-Saxon Review, a sumptuous publication which for a brief period revived the glories of the Books of Beauty and Keepsakes, edited in the 'thirties and 'forties of the last century by that "most gorgeous" lady, the Countess of Blessington.
Pseudo-intellectuality was one of the social shams which Punch loved to pillory, and there is a good example in 1901 in the "Cultured Conversation" of a lady who observes, "I'm devoted to Rossetti—I delight in Shelley—and I simply love Ella Wheeler Wilcox." Punch himself in the same year "delighted" quite sincerely in Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., and "wept tears of laughter" over the episode of "Lisheen Races." This was apparently his first introduction to the work of those two wonderfully gifted Irish cousins, Violet Martin and Edith Somerville, but only towards the end of their long and fruitful collaboration did he recognize in them far higher qualities than those of the mere mirth-provoker.
In 1903 he was destined to make acquaintance with one of the most conspicuous representatives of the opposite tendency, Gorki, the Russian novelist and playwright. In "The Lowest Depths" Punch parodied the dreary, violent and brutal squalors of The Lower Depths, and incidentally had a dig at the Stage Society for producing it. It was in the same year that Punch described the "new curse of Caine"—"to be everlastingly coupled with the name of Miss Marie Corelli"—and paid them both grateful homage as purveyors of "copy":—
From cutting continual capers
Ev'n Kaisers must sometimes refrain;
But you're never out of the papers—
Corelli and Caine.