From The Light Green, Cambridge, 1872.
The Editor of The World offered two prizes for compositions (in the style of Thomas Carlyle) describing Mr. Gladstone’s portrait by Millais, and on August 6, 1879, it published the two following parodies:—
First Prize.
Turn we, therefore, from this jaunting, jostling, pestering Piccadilly into the Academy—whether really Royal this year I know not, or whether it be no more than the grandest Graphic we have had this many months, the most illustrious Illustrated of the year. Pause not to catch glamorous glancing glimpses of the besodden (with rain only, think you?) Season’s Beauties—drawn verily, each of them, by most Special Correspondents—but step sternly on, and stop face to face with this William—the People’s William, as the mob hath not dubiously dubbed him. Is it the Portrait merely or the Man himself that ye have come out for to see? Be you friend or foe to him, is there not in this counterfeit presentment of him—this wild, much-suffering, much-inflicting (not on trees only) man—something which almost attaches you? Is it not the attitude and face of a man who hath said to Cant, ‘Begone!’ to Dilettantism, ‘Here canst thou not be!’ and to Truth, ‘Be thou in place of all—ay, of ‘place’ itself to me!’—a man who hath manfully defied the ‘Time-Prince’ or Devil to his face, by all weapons, in all places, at all times? See you not, in the earnestly, sternly eagle-eyed look of him the ground of the enthusiasm,—The Schwärmerei,—for him? Contrast him not odiously, but in sober, sensible silence, with the dazzling Dizzy, the bright Beaconsfield. Which of them, both great, is really greatest? Which the grandest Thing and thoughtfullest we have done lately? Which will we send to the next Exhibition, Paris or otherwise? Which of them will we show for our Honour, with Peace or without it, amongst foreign nations, and for our Peace with Honour surely amongst ourselves? Which? Consider now, if they asked us, “Choose ye not this time, like ill-starred princess ’twixt axe and crown,’ but twixt the man who sways the axe, and him who rejects (rightly doubtless) the crown; ’twixt the lopper of laurels, and the creator of crowns, Imperial and other, that fade.” Consider now, if they asked us, “Will you give up your William or your Benjamin,—not little truly, and just now your Ruler—O ye lost Tribes of Israel? Never have had any William, or never have had any Benjamin?” Consider now both of them, all of you, as Men of State, of Letters, ay, of Post-cards also if you will! Really it were a grave question. Official persons would doubtless answer in official language; but we, for our part, should not we also be forced to answer, ‘Benjamin or no Benjamin, we cannot do without William’? He is verily ours,—not with us here and there only, in Oriental mystery amongst us; but ours always,—Fortnightly, our own Contemporary (or a large part of it), our best Nineteenth Century Man.
Conservative.
Second Prize.
Here, O belated wayfarer, in thy weary march in search of the Beautiful, after painful journeying through a Realm of æsthetic Unrealities, pause! Thou art verily at last in presence of a Man. No mere clothes-bundle of humanity this, presented before thee, smirking, pomatumed, garnered from the Dustbin of the Ages—marvelling by what blundering Miracle of the Destinies he finds himself there. Wandering in this bewildering waste of ruined canvas, that by wise guidance might have evolved itself into practical Breeches for the Breechless in this howling naked world—this many-tinted appalling array of painted, but, alas, soulless Flesh—of bewigged Pomposity, of empty Dead-Sea faces with no Souls behind them, children of the Inane begotten in Vanity and brought forth in Vexation of Spirit, acres of æsthetic Upholstery, Sugar-loaf Confectionary, perpetuated Blockheadism, respectable Giggery, and other like phenomena,—all jumbled together, gibbeted in veneer and gold;—here, at last, I say, amid this motley throng, come we on a glimpse of the Ideal, a Giant among pigmies, a Man surrounded by Tailor-puppets, a human Soul gazing out from an earnest human face intent upon things other than mere cultivation of the Digestive faculty. Yea, look upon him! An earnest, passionate, restless, lean, but withal noble face. An eager eye, but pathetic in its eagerness, looking out compassionately on this sad oppressed world. Stern compressed lips, an undaunted brow, with a Stormy Force hidden under the calm exterior. Straight he looks into the Shams and Chicanery of our insincere Charlatan age,—the keen lightnings of his eye, and fierce thunderbolts of his tongue, cleaving, piercing, exploding the Windbags and inflated Bladders that in our noodle, jabbering, screech-owl Parliament try to pass themselves as Verities and Realities. O my brothers, look on this, a fragment of the Real flung by some miracle amid the Unreal, of the Invisible made Visible, embodying for us, and for those who come after us, a picture, a semblance, an apparition, a Verisimilitude of Greatness that will survive the cacklings and hissings and venom-squirting propensities of a purblind Age!
TEUFELSDRÖCKH JUNIOR.