If you want it to be profitably banned.
So be lavish and effusive in suggesting
A malignant and mephitic atmosphere,
And you're sure to be applauded as "arresting,"
"Elemental," "unalluring," and "sincere."
Mr. Gosse and the Georgian Poets
In the same year Mr. Edmund Gosse had indulged in some caustic criticism of the Poetry of the Future. Mr. Gosse had said that "the natural uses of English and the obvious forms of our speech will be driven from our poetry." Also that "verses of excellent quality in this primitive manner can now be written by any smart little boy in a grammar school." Hence a squib in which Punch makes disrespectful fun of "the Sainte-Beuve of the House of Lords," who, it may be added, has since made his peace with the young lions whom he had treated so disrespectfully. In 1913 the cult of Rabindranath Tagore had become fashionable. Here was an Oriental poet who sedulously eschewed the flamboyant exuberance of the westernized Indian, but Punch, while finding him a less fruitful theme for burlesque than the Babu immortalized by Mr. Anstey, regarded his mystical simplicity as fair game for parody, and declined to worship at his shrine. Another foreign importation, Mr. Conrad—whom in virtue of long residence in England, marvellous command of our language and unequalled insight into the magic of the sea and the simple heroism of the British sailorman, we are proud to call one of ourselves and one of the glories of English fiction—fascinated Punch in 1900, the year in which Lord Jim appeared. Punch was a little disconcerted at first by Mr. Conrad's oblique method of narration, but the fascination grew with advancing years.
Farewell to Mark Twain
I find few references to Continental authors, but may single out the "little English wreath" which Punch added to the memorial tributes to Alphonse Daudet on his death in 1897. Daudet's affinities with Dickens, always one of Punch's heroes, naturally appealed to him apart from the humour of Tartarin and the masterly studies of the Second Empire which Daudet had seen from the inside as one of the Duc de Morny's private secretaries. Towards American writers Punch was almost uniformly sympathetic. It is true that he appreciated the earlier and American manner of Henry James more than the later cosmopolitan phase which began with The Portrait of a Lady. But during the short period in which Punch, in his "additional pages," published a number of short stories by various authors, Henry James was a contributor, and Mrs. Medwin appeared in serial form in four successive numbers in August and September, 1901. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who died in 1894, is compared to Elia in the graceful memorial stanzas modelled on "The Last Leaf." Mr. W. D. Howells's papers on London and England in Harper's Magazine in 1904 prompt a generous acknowledgment of their reasonableness, sanity and humour, together with an expression of amazement at the productivity of American short-story writers, mostly in the manner of Mr. Henry James. Punch, both then and afterwards, refused to take Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox seriously, and described her essays, The Woman of the World, as "high-toned but serenely platitudinous; 'bland, passionate, but deeply religious.'" Mark Twain, on his visit to London in 1907, was welcomed with pen and pencil—in the cartoon "To a Master of his Art," where Punch salutes him over the punch-bowl and in some verses, à propos of the dinner at the Pilgrims' Club:—
Pilot of many Pilgrims since the shout