George. "Ah, but look here! We've drawn him riding to church, you know!"
And what a part eating and drinking play in English life and English art! Every body appears to give dinners occasionally, and all the dealers in vegetables seem to stand ready to serve as waiters at five shillings for an evening. Food is a common topic of conversation, and it is a civility for people to show an interest in one another's alimentary pleasures. "Glad to see yer feed so beautiful, Mrs. B——," remarks a portly host to a corpulent lady, his Christmas guest. "Thank yer, Mr. J——," says she, with knife and fork at rest and pointing to the ceiling; "I'm doin' lovely." Again, old Mr. Brown, entertaining young Mr. Green, says, with emphasis, "That wine, sir, has been in my cellar four-and-twenty years come last Christmas—four-and-twenty years, sir!" To which innocent Mr. Green, anxious to say something agreeable, replies, "Has it really, sir? What must it have been when it was new?" Little Emily asks her mother, "What is capital punishment?" Master Harry replies, "Why, being locked up in the pantry! I should consider it so." Even at the theatres, we may infer from some of the pictures, ale and porter are handed round between the acts of the play. In one picture we see two lovers looking upon the sky; poetical Augustus says, "Look, Edith! how lovely are those fleecy cloudlets, dappled over the—" Edith (not in a spirit of burlesque) replies, "Yes, 'xactly like gravy when it's getting cold—isn't it?" Then we have two gentlemen in the enjoyment of a little dinner, one of a long series given in the absence of the family at Boulogne. The master of the house receives a telegram. He reads it, heaves a deep sigh, and says, dolefully, "It's all up!" Bachelor friend asks, "What's the matter?" Paterfamilias replies, "Telegram! She says they've arrived safe at Folkestone, and will be home about 10.30." No more little dinners. Only a wife and children for comfort. And here are two of Mr. Du Maurier's pretty children eating slices of bread too thinly spread with jam, and Ethel says, with thoughtful earnestness, "I dare say the queen and her courtiers eat a whole pot of jam every day, Harry!" There are many hundreds of pictures in Punch which show a kind of solemn interest in the repair of wasted tissue never seen in this country. It is evident that the English have a deep delight in the act of taking sustenance which is to us unknown. Mr. Thackeray himself, in speaking of an Englishman's first glass of beer on returning home from a long journey in other lands, casts his eyes to heaven and gives way to something like enthusiasm.
John Tenniel.
Many pictures bring into juxtaposition extremes of civilization rarely witnessed in America. So many traps are set for ignorance in this country that a child can scarcely hope to get by them all, and escape into maturity an absolute dolt. Observe this conversation between a squire and a villager: "Hobson, they tell me you've taken your boy away from the national school. What's that for?" "'Cause the master ain't fit to teach un. He wanted to teach my boy to spell taters with a P." Here, again, is a scene in a London picture-gallery that presents a curious incongruity. A group is standing before one of the works of Ary Scheffer, and an East-ender, catalogue in hand, makes this comment upon the artist's name: "'Ary Scheffer! Hignorant fellers, these foreigners, Bill! Spells 'Enery without the Haitch!" In New York we have doubtless people that would be as incongruous as this in such a scene, but they do not visit picture-galleries. Nor have we among us a photographer who could essay to bring a smile to a sitter's face by saying, "Just look a little pleasant, miss: think of 'im!" It is evident from many hundreds of such sketches that there are great numbers of people in England who exercise difficult callings, hold responsible positions, dress in silk and broadcloth, and are in many particulars accomplished and well equipped for the stress of city life, who are destitute of mental culture to a degree which is associated in our minds only with squalor and degradation.
The spirit of caste, which appears to be only less strong in England than in India, affords countless opportunities to English comic art. Imagine a coster-monger profusely and laboriously apologizing to a well-dressed passer-by for presuming to speak to him in order to let him know that his coat-tail is burning: "You'll excuse my addressin' of you, sir—common man in a manner of speakin'—gen'leman like you, sir—beggin' pardon for takin' the liberty, which I should never 'a thought of doin' under ordinary succumstances, sir, only you didn't seem to be aware on it, but it struck me as I see you agoin' along as you were afire, sir!" During the delivery of this apology combustion had continued, and Brown's coat-tail was entirely consumed, his box of fusees having ignited some seconds before the coster-monger began his discourse. A few years ago Punch gave a little "Sea-side Drama" that illustrates another phase of the same universal foible. Mrs. De Tomkyns to her husband: "Ludovic dear, there's Algernon playing with a strange child! Do prevent it." "How on earth am I to prevent it?" "Tell its parents Algernon is just recovering from the scarlet fever." Mr. De Tomkyns accordingly makes this fictitious statement to the father of the obnoxious child, who replies, "It's all right, sir; so's our little girl." Punch hits it fairly, too, in a pictured tête-à-tête between Mr. Shoddy and Mrs. Sharp. Mr. Shoddy remarks, as he sips his coffee, that he never feels safe from the ubiquitous British snob until he is south of the Danube. To this Mrs. Sharp responds by asking, "And what do the—a—South Danubians say, Mr. Shoddy?"
The moral feeling of the Punch artists is so generally sound that it is surprising to find them often taking the wrong and popular side of the "conflict of ages" between mistress and maid. But if they usually laugh with the mistress and at the maid, they occasionally laugh with the maid and at the mistress; and truly the wildest absurdity attributed to the British servant seems venial compared with the thoughtless arrogance of the typical British mistress. Punch does not wholly neglect her morals. Another hundred volumes or so will doubtless bring her over to Sydney Smith's opinion, that all the virtues and graces are not to be had for seven pounds per annum. It was a happy retort upon "No Irish need apply," to present an English servant-girl peremptorily leaving a place because she had discovered that the family was Irish, alleging that her friends would never forgive her if they knew she had lived in an Irish family. The picture, too, is good of a pretty servant walking home in the evening behind an elderly and ill-favored lady to "protect" her from insult. Punch wishes to know who is to protect the pretty girl on her return through London streets alone. We see also from numberless pictures that the British mistress deems it her right to control the dress of the British maid. When crinoline came in, she thought it impudent in a servant to wear it; but when crinoline went out, she deemed it no less presuming in her to lay it aside.
For some years past the pictures of children and their ways by Mr. Du Maurier have been among the most pleasing efforts of comic art in England. There is not the faintest intimation in them of the malevolent or sarcastic. All good fathers, all good mothers, and all persons worthy to become such, delight in them. They are such pictures as we should naturally expect from an artist who was himself the happy father of a houseful of happy children, and who consequently looked upon all the children of the world in a fond, parental spirit. Surely no Bohemian, no hapless dweller in a boarding-house, no desolate frequenter of clubs, no one not sharing in the social life of his time, could so delightfully represent and minister to it. Du Maurier vindicates the generation that has produced Gavarni and Woodhull. He reminds us from week to week that children are the sufficient compensation of virtuous existence, worth all the rest of its honors and delights.
The recent agitation in England of questions relating to religion has not escaped the caricaturist. For two centuries or more the caricaturists of Great Britain have been hearty Protestants, though not long Puritan, and we still find them laughing at the fulminations of the testy old clergyman who lives in the Vatican. Nor have they failed to reflect upon the too evident fact that it is the contentions of clergymen in England that have blocked the way into the national school. The old-fashioned penny broadside, all alive with figures and words, has been revived by "Gegeef," to promote the secularization of the schools. In one of them all the parties to the controversy are exhibited—the candidate for the mastership of a Government school, who "believes in Colenso and geology, but don't mind teaching Genesis to oblige;" the minister who holds up the text, "One faith, one baptism," but demands that the baptism taught should be his baptism; Thomas Paine, too, who points to his "Age of Reason," and says, "When you finish, I shall have something to say;" the compromiser, who is willing to have Bible lessons given in the schools, provided they are given "without comment;" and, of course, the radical Bradlaugh, who demands secularization pure and simple. The same draughtsman, whose zeal is more manifest than his skill, has attempted to show, in various penny sheets, that amidst all those sectarian conflicts the one true light for the guidance of bewildered men is Science.