A more able and important foe than these was Harry S. Leigh, who in 1864 was editor of "The Arrow," with Mortimer Collins as verse-writer and Matt Morgan as cartoonist. Leigh opened his attack with rhymes that were greatly enjoyed at the time. They ran thus:—
Rhymes for a Big Baby.
No. I.
"Sad stuff of Lemon's,"
Think the bells of St. Clement's;
"Not worth five farthings,"
Sneer the bells of St. Martin's;
"Going down daily,"
Grunt the bells of Old Bailey;
"Once it was rich,"
Hint the bells of Shoreditch:
"When could that be?"
Ask the bells of Step-ney;
"Hanged if I know,"
Growls the big bell at Bow.
No. II.
Sing a song of threepence,
A paper full of trash;
Four-and-twenty "funny men"
Have made a pretty hash;
For when the paper's opened,
One soon begins to sing—
"Oh! threepence is a dainty price
To pay for such a thing."
And he returns to the charge later on in a set of verses in which he pretends to pay tribute to Punch's bygone force—"honest if delicate"—and to Judy's and Toby's straightforward roughness. After making charges of corruption, he proceeds:
"Alas! how times and manners pass!
When no one fears a panic—
When Scotland tolerates the Mass—
And Spain is puritanic;
When Yankee 'anacondas' scrunch
The South's heroic leader—
Then may we find a pleasant Punch,
And Punch a happy reader."
Nowadays the commoner form of humorous attack upon Punch is the assumption that it is a serious journal: a cold-blooded analysis of its contents will be made, or the quotation of its best bits under the ungrateful title of "Alleged Humour from Punch;" or a joke will be printed and savagely "quoted" as "From next week's Punch." When the three "New Humorists," Messrs. Barry Pain, Jerome, and Zangwill, were driven to despair (so says one of them) by the sneers of the Press, they met in solemn conclave and swore never to make another joke. So Mr. Zangwill set to work at a serious novel. Mr. Jerome took to editing a weekly paper, and Mr. Pain began writing for Punch! Even when Mr. Pincott, for thirty years the "reader" on the paper, committed suicide the day after his wife was buried, a number of papers could not resist the temptation that was offered. "Fancy having to read through all Punch's jokes week after week for years!" exclaimed one. "No wonder we are a hardy race. No wonder the poor man shot himself." Mr. Pincott was a man of great ability, of remarkable erudition, and extreme conscientiousness. Although his bereavement was preying on his mind, he saw the paper out, and did not commit the fatal act until he had sent his usual letter to the Editor, wherewith he would relieve himself of his week's responsibility. "I never met a man with so much information and of so varied a character," writes one of his fellow-workers. "He never passed a quotation without verifying it, and could give you chapter and verse for everything. He knew his Shakespeare by heart, and all the modern poets, and he was never at fault in his classics." He was not, however, allowed to leave the world without a farewell gibe and a laugh, for Wit knows no mercy.
Another main charge laid at Punch's door is that he is too little like Hogarth in the past, too little like French satirists in the present. Thackeray's proud boast that the paper had never said aught that could cause a girl's cheek to mantle with a blush,[26] is acknowledged by the naturalist and realist of the day as the severest condemnation that could be brought against it. "We do not want in Punch a moral paper virginibus puerisque," says M. Arsène Alexandre, in effect, in his important work "L'Art du Rire;" "Punch is un peu trop gentleman. What we want is to be enlightened." But Punch has not chosen to cast the beams of his search-light on to that side of "life" which is turned towards vice; and if he determines that the liaisons and all the attendant world of humour that afford inspiration to the talent of the Grévins, the Forains, the Guillaumes, and the Willettes of France, are outside his field of treatment, who shall blame him? If there is any moral at all to be gleaned from the work of the Punch caricaturists, it is argued, it is the never-ending sermon, though the sermon is a humorous one, of the non-existence of immorality. Perhaps; but Punch does not aspire to reflect the savagery we call civilisation by painting a Hogarthian "Progress," nor to preach virtue by depicting vice. It is no doubt very appalling and amusing to hear a young girl-cynic say, as she points to a hideous monkey in a zoological gardens—"He only wants a little money to be just like a man!" Ça donne à penser; but Punch prefers wholesome jests to irony and repellent cynicism, and is content to leave his impeachment in the hands of his spice-loving detractors, even at the risk of being reminded year by year that "Gentle Dulness ever loves a joke."