"What has been may recur. Should a Brummagem Cæsar
Try a dash at John Bull, after conqu'ring the Gauls,
I intend he shall find the achievement a teaser,
What with Armstrongs, long Enfields, and stout wooden walls."
The visit of the Empress Eugénie to the Queen at Windsor Castle, and the abolition of passports for Englishmen in France (which Punch accepted as a latch-key, "to come and go as he liked"), disposed the paper a little more kindly towards the Emperor; but it was for the Franco-Prussian War to bring out the full strength and the true perspicuity of Punch's judgment. There was little fooling here. His warning was serious and solemn; he followed every act of the great drama with breathless interest and with unsurpassed power of apprehension and pictorial demonstration; and his sympathy for the misfortunes of "la grande nation," and his horror at the terrors of the Commune, did not prevent his pity going forth to the broken leader who had played and lost, and who returned to England in a plight far sadder and more desperate than that in which he had lived his Bohemian life thirty years before.
In considering Punch's attitude during his long career, it must be borne in mind that he has always aimed at representing the sentiments of the better part of the country—seeing with London's eyes, and judging by London standards. Punch is an Englishman of intense patriotism, but primarily a Citizen of London, and a far truer incarnation of it—for all his chaff of aldermen and turtle—than the Lord Mayor and Chairman of the County Council put together. "But the aspects under which either British lion, Gallic eagle, or Russian bear have been regarded by our contemplative serial," says Ruskin, in a passage which to some extent bears out this contention, "are unfortunately dependent on the fact that all his three great designers (Tenniel, Leech, and du Maurier) are, in the most narrow sense, London citizens. I have said that every great man belongs not only to his own city, but to his own village. The artists of Punch have no village to belong to; the street-corner is the face of the whole earth, and the only two quarters of the heavenly horizon are the east and west—End." Especially did Punch represent English feeling during the great reforms of the 'Forties and 'Fifties. Of course he made mistakes, and many of them. "He who never made a mistake never made anything." He ground the No-Popery organ; he defended the Ecclesiastical Titles Act; he ridiculed the Jewish Disabilities Bill; he fostered the idea of relentless vengeance on the Indian mutineers and rebels, and bitterly opposed Lord Canning's more humane policy;[12] he issued cartoons during the Secession War—to use the words of Mr. Henry James—"under an evil star;" he aimed poisoned shafts at Louis Philippe; he scoffed, at first, at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and seriously retarded its progress; he failed to appreciate Lord Aberdeen's statesmanship, like the rest of his contemporaries, during the Crimean War; he joked at Turner, and sneered at the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; he attacked Bright and Cobden for their attitude during the Chinese War; he denounced Carlyle's "Latter-day Pamphlets" as mere "barking and froth;" he ridiculed Joseph Hume with a cruel persistence that called forth a passionate protest from the "Westminster Review" against the scurrilous attack on one who was "too good" for it, for which Punch handsomely apologised on Hume's death (March 10th, 1855); and generally, in his own words, "at this early date Mr. Punch in his exuberance wrote much that he would now hesitate to commit to paper, and for which, if it did appear, he would certainly be taken severely to task by a hundred correspondents, of whom a majority would be of the strait-laced order, and the minority would be largely recruited from North Britain."
LEECH'S ORIGINAL SKETCH FOR "PEEL'S DIRTY BOY."
"Peel's Dirty Little Boy."
Dame Peel: "Drat the boy! He's always in a mess."
(From the Cartoon by Leech in "Punch," Vol. VIII., p. 145. March 29th, 1845.)