Limits permitting, it would be pleasant to refer at length to various other marked graces of Punch,—such, for example, as his care for true Art, by exposing to merited contempt the abortions of statuary, painting, and architecture that come under his accurate eye,—his concern for good letters, exhibited in fantastic parodies of affectations, mannerisms, absurdities of plot, and vices of style in modern poets and novelists,—his "nil nisi bonum," and, where there is no "bonum," his silent "nil," of the dead, whom when living he pursued with unrelenting raillery,—his cool, eclectic judgments, freedom from extremes, and other manifestations of clear-headedness and refined sentiment, glimmering and shooting through his rollicking drollery, quick wit, and quiet humor. But we must pass them by, to emphasize a quality that out-tops and outshines them all,—his humanity.
This is Mr. Punch's specialty, generating his purest fun and consecrating his versatile talents to highest ends. Wherever he catches meanness, avarice, selfishness, force, preying upon the humble and the weak, he is sure to give them hard knocks with his baton, or home-thrusts with his pen and pencil. His practical kindness is charmingly comprehensive, too. He speaks for the dumb beast, pleads for the maltreated brutes of Smithfield Market, craves compassion for skeleton omnibus-horses, with the same ready sympathy that he fights for cheated fellow-mortals. In the court of public opinion, he is volunteer counsel for all in any way defrauded or kept in bondage by pitiless pride, barbarous policy, thoughtless luxury, or wooden-headed prejudice. His sound ethics do not admit that the lower law of man's enactment can, under any circumstances, override or abrogate the higher laws of God. Consequently, he judges with unbiased, instinctive rectitude, when he shows up in black and white the Model Republic's criminal anomaly, by making the African Slave a companion-piece to the Greek Slave, among "Jonathan's" contributions to the great Crystal Palace Exhibition. In this same vein of a wide-ranging application of the Golden Rule, he is ever on the alert to brand inhuman deeds and institutions, wherever found. You cannot very often hit him with the "tu quoque" retort, insinuate that he lives in a house of glass, or charge him with visiting his condemnation upon distant iniquities whilst winking at iniquities of equal magnitude directly under his nose.
Punch is no Mrs. Jellyby, brimful of zeal for Borrio boolas in far-off Africas, and utterly stolid to disorders and distresses under his own roof. Proud of the glory, he feels and confesses the shame of England; and the grinding injustice of her caste-system, aristocracy, and hierarchy does not escape the lash of his rebuke. He is the friend of the threadbare curate, performing the larger half of clerical duty and getting but a tittle of the tithes,—of the weary seamstress, wetting with midnight tears the costly stuff which must be ready to adorn heartless rank and fashion at to-morrow's pageant,—of the pale governess, grudgingly paid her pittance of salary without a kind word to sweeten the bitterness of a lonely lot. He is the friend even of the workhouse juveniles, and, as their champion, castigates with cutting sarcasm and stinging scorn the reverend and honorable guardians, who, just as, full of hope, they had reached the door of the theatre, prohibited a band of these wretched orphans from availing of a kind-hearted manager's invitation to an afternoon performance of "Jack and the Bean-Stalk." Truly, Punch is more than half right, as, in his indignation, he declares, "It will go luckily with some four-faced Christians, if, with the fullest belief in their own right of entry of paradise, they are not 'stopped at the very doors'"; and the parson, in the case, gets but his deserts, when at his lugubrious sham-piety are hurled stanzas like these:—
"Their little faces beamed with joy
Two miles upon their way,
As they supposed, each girl and boy,
About to see the play.
Their little cheeks with tears were wet,
As back again they went,
Balked by a sanctimonious set,
Led by a Reverend Gent.
"And if such Reverend Gents as he
Could get the upperhand,
Ah, what a hateful tyranny
Would override the land!
That we may never see that time,
Down with the canting crew
That would out of their pantomime
Poor little children do!"
Punch is the friend of all who are friendless, and, with a generous spirit of protection, gives credit to whom credit is due, whatever conventionality, precedent, monopoly, or routine may say to the contrary. During the Crimean War, he took care of the fame of the rank-and-file of the army. The dispatches to Downing Street, reporting the gallantry of titled officers, were more than matched by Punch's imitative dispatches from the seat of war, setting forth the exploits of Sergeant O'Brien, Corporal Stout, or Private Gubbins. He saw to it that those who had the hardest of the fight, the smallest pay, and the coarsest rations, should not be forgotten in the gazetting of the heroes. Indeed, our comic friend's fellowship of soul with the humblest members of the human family is a notable trait; it is so ready, and yet withal so judicious. It is no part of his philosophy, as already intimated, violently and rashly to disturb the existing order of things, and set one class in rebellion against other classes. He simply insists upon the recognition of the law of mutual dependence all round. This is observable in his dealing with the vexed question of domestic service. The prime trouble of housekeeping comes in frequently for a share of his attention; and underneath ironical counsels, you may trace, quietly insinuating itself into graphic sketches, the genial intent fairly to adjust the relations between life above and life below stairs. Accordingly, Punch sees no reason why Angelina may have a lover in the parlor, whilst Bridget's engagement forbids her to entertain a fond "follower" in the kitchen; and he perversely refuses to see how it can be right for Miss Julia to listen to the soft nonsense of Captain Augustus Fitzroy in the drawing-room, and entirely wrong for Molly, the nursery-maid, to blush at the blunt admiration of the policeman, talking to her down the area. Punch is independent and original in this respect. His strange creed seems to be, that human nature is human nature,—whether, in its feminine department, you robe it in silk or calico, and, in its male department, button a red coat over the breast of an officer of the Guards, or put the coarse jerkin on the broad back of the industrious toilsman. And according to this whimsical belief, he writes and talks jocosely, but with covert common sense. His warm and catholic humanity runs up and down the whole social scale with a clear-sighted equity. His philanthropy is what the word literally signifies,—the love of man as man, and because he is a man. Without being an impracticable fanatic, advocating impossible theories, or theories that can grow into realities only with the gradual progress of the race,—without indulging in fanciful visions of unapproached Utopias,—without imagining that all, wherever born and however nurtured, can reach the same level of wealth and station,—he holds, not merely that
"Honor and shame from no condition rise,"
but also, be the condition high or low, the worthy occupant of it, by reason of the common humanity he shares with all above and all beneath and all around him, has a brother's birthright to brotherly treatment, to even-handed justice and open-handed charity.
We have taken it for granted that Punch is a household necessity and familiar friend of our readers; and, resisting as far as possible the besetting temptation to refer in detail to the many pictorial and letter-press illustrations of his merits, have spoken of him as "a representative man,"—the universally acknowledged example of the legitimate and beneficent uses of the sportive faculties; thus indirectly claiming for these faculties more than toleration.
The variety in human nature must somehow be brought into unity, and its diversified, strongly contrasted elements shown to be parts of a symmetrical and harmonious whole. The philosophy, the religion, which overlooks or condemns any of these elements, is never satisfactory, and fails to win sincere belief, because of its felt incompleteness. All men have an instinctive faith that in God's plan no incontestable facts are exceptional or needless facts. Science assumes this in regard to the phenomena of the natural world; and, in its progressive searches, expects to discover continual proof that all manifestations, however opposite and contradictory, are parts of one beneficent scheme. Accordingly, Science starts on its investigations with the conviction that the storm is as salutary as the sunshine,—that there is utility in what seems mere luxury,—and that Nature's loveliness and grandeur, Nature's oddity and grotesqueness, have a substantial value, as well as Nature's wheat-harvests. Now the same principle is to be recognized in dealing with things spiritual. It may not be affirmed that anything appertaining to universal consciousness—spontaneous, irresistible, as breathing—is of itself base, and therefore to be put away; since so to do is to question the Creative Wisdom. The work of the Infinite Spirit must be consistent; and you might as truly charge the bright stars with malignity as denounce as vile one faculty or capacity of the mind. Consequently, there is a use for all forms of wit and humor.