of snub nose or flat forehead which became extinct with the Dodo, or the insertions of muscle and articulations of joint which are common to the flesh of all humanity. 148. Returning to our immediate subject, and considering Punch as the expression of the popular voice, which he virtually is, and even somewhat obsequiously, is it not wonderful that he has never a word to say for the British manufacturer, and that the true citizen of his own city is represented by him only under the types, either of Sir Pompey Bedell' or of the more tranquil magnate and potentate, the bulwark of British constitutional principles and initiator of British private enterprise, Mr. John Smith, whose biography is given with becoming reverence by Miss Ingelow, in the last but one of her Stories told to a Child?2 And is it not also surely some overruling power in the nature of things, quite other than the desire of his readers, which compels Mr. Punch, when the squire, the colonel, and the admiral are to be at once expressed, together with all that they legislate or fight for, in the symbolic figure of the nation, to represent the incarnate John Bull always as a farmer, never as a manufacturer or shopkeeper, and to conceive and exhibit him rather as paymaster for the faults of his neighbours, than as watching for opportunity of gain out of their follies? 149. It had been well if either under this accepted, though now antiquated, type, or under the more poetical symbols of Britannia, or the British Lion, Punch had ventured oftener to intimate the exact degree in which the nation was following its ideal; and marked the occasions when Britannia's crest began too fatally to lose its resemblance to Athena's, and liken itself to an ordinary cockscomb, or when the British lion had-of course only for a moment, and probably in pecuniary difficulties-dropped his tail between his legs. [A favourite character in Du Maurier's Society Pictures: see, for instance, Punch, April 28 and November 10, 1883.] 2 ["The Life of Mr. John Smith," pp. 367-379 in Stories told to a Child, "By the author of 'Studies for Stories,'" 1865.] 150. But the aspects under which either British lion, Gallic eagle, or Russian bear have been regarded by our contemplative serial, are unfortunately dependent on the fact that all his three great designers 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; for them, the street corner is the face of the whole earth, and the two only quarters of the heavenly horizon are the east and west-End. And although Leech's conception of the Distinguished Foreigner, Du Maurier's of the Herr Professor,' and Tenniel's of La Liberté, or La France, are all extremely true and delightful,—to the superficial extent of the sketch by Dickens in Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings, they are, effectively, all seen with Mrs. Lirriper's eyes; they virtually represent of the Continent little more than the upper town of Boulogne; nor has anything yet been done by all the wit and all the kindness of these great popular designers to deepen the reliance of any European nation on the good qualities of its neighbours. 151. You no doubt have at the Union the most interesting and beautiful series of the Tenniel cartoons which have been collectively published, with the explanation of their motives. If you begin with No. 38, you will find a consecutive series of ten extremely forcible drawings, casting the utmost obloquy in the power of the designer upon the French Emperor, the Pope, and the Italian clergy, and alike discourteous to the head of the nation which had fought side by side with us at Inkerman, and impious in its representation of the Catholic power to which Italy owed, and still owes, whatever has made her glorious * Above, § 65 [p. 311]. 1 [For another reference to this type, see Vol. XVI. p. 277 n.] 2 For other references to the French sketches in Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy (the sequel to Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings), see Proserpina, Vol. XXV. p. 455 n.; and see also Vol. XXIX. p. 475.] among the nations of Christendom, or happy among the families of the earth.1 Among them you will find other two, representing our wars with China, and the triumph of our missionary manner of compelling free trade at the point of the bayonet: while, for the close and consummation of the series, you will see the genius and valour of your country figuratively summed in the tableau, subscribed,— "John Bull defends his pudding." Is this indeed then the final myth of English heroism, into which King Arthur, and St. George, and Britannia, and the British Lion are all collated, concluded, and perfected by Evolution, in the literal words of Carlyle, "like four whale cubs combined by boiling"?? Do you wish your Queen in future to style herself Placentæ, instead of Fidei, Defensor?3 and is it to your pride, to your hope, or even to your pleasure, that this once sacred as well as sceptred island of yours, in whose second capital city Constantine was crowned; -to whose shores St. Augustine and St. Columba brought benediction ;-who gave her Lionhearts to the Tombs of the East,-her Pilgrim Fathers to the Cradle of the West;-who has wrapped the sea round 1 [Cartoons from Punch, by John Tenniel, First Series. The subjects referred to are: No. 38, "New Elgin Marbles" (Lord Elgin compelling the Emperor of China pay the indemnity for the last China war-November 1860). No. 39, "St. George and the Chinese Dragon." to No. 40, "The Eldest Son of the Church" (the Pope in bed in a night-cap, the Emperor Napoleon trying on the Papal Crown-December 1860). No. 43, "A Good Offer" (Garibaldi offering a cap of Liberty to "Papa Pius"-September 1860). No. 44, "The Hero and the Saint" (the latter, a ruffianly priest carrying a bottle labelled "Blood of St. Januarius" and a canvas labelled "Winking Picture"; Garibaldi, in heroic attitude, bidding him be gone-September 1860). No. 45, "The Two Sick Men" (the Emperor Napoleon offering gruel to the Pope and the Sultan-August 1860). No. 47, "John Bull guards his Pudding" (the Volunteer movement and antiFrench feeling-December 31, 1859). For another reference to this last, see Fors Clavigera, Letter 93 (Vol. XXIX. p. 469).] 2 [See below, p. 426.] 3 [Compare above, p. 209.] See above, p. 225.] her for her mantle, and breathes with her strong bosom the air of every sign in heaven;-is it to your good pleasure that the Hero-children born to her in these latter days should write no loftier legend on their shields than "John Bull defends his pudding"? 152. I chanced only the other day on a minor, yet, to my own mind, very frightful proof of the extent to which this caitiff symbol is fastening itself in the popular mind. I was in search of some extremely pastoral musical instrument, whereby to regulate the songs of our Coniston village children, without the requirement of peculiar skill either in master or monitor. But the only means of melody offered to me by the trade of the neighbourhood was this so-called "harmonicon,"-purchaseable, according to your present notions, cheaply, for a shilling; and with this piece of cheerful mythology on its lid gratis, wherein you see what "Gradus ad Parnassum" we prepare for the rustic mind, and that the virtue and the jollity of England are vested only in the money-bag in each hand of him. I shall place this harmonicon lid in your schools,1 among my examples of what we call liberal education,— and, with it, what instances I can find of the way Florence, Siena, or Venice taught their people to regard themselves. 153. For, indeed, in many a past year, it has every now and then been a subject of recurring thought to me, what such a genius as that of Tenniel would have done for us, had we asked the best of it, and had the feeling of the nation respecting the arts, as a record of its honour, been like that of the Italians in their proud days. To some extent, the memory of our bravest war has been preserved for us by the pathetic force of Mrs. Butler; but her conceptions are realistic only, and rather of thrilling episodes than of great military principle and thought. 1 [This, however, was not done.] [Punch, November 17, 1883, had a skit, following up this suggestion, entitled "The Fireside' at Venice; or, How would it have been?"] [For a reference to the picture of "Quatre Bras" by Miss Elizabeth Thompson (now Lady Butler), see Vol. XIV. pp. 307, 308.] On the contrary, Tenniel has much of the largeness and symbolic mystery of imagination which belong to the great leaders of classic art: in the shadowy masses and sweeping lines of his great compositions, there are tendencies which might have won his adoption into the school of Tintoret; and his scorn of whatever seems to him dishonest or contemptible in religion, would have translated itself into awe in the presence of its vital power. I gave you, when first I came to Oxford, Tintoret's picture of the Doge Mocenigo, with his divine spiritual attendants, in the cortile of St. Mark's. It is surely our own fault, more than Mr. Tenniel's, if the best portraits he can give us of the heads of our English government should be rather on the occasion of their dinner at GreenIwich than their devotion at St. Paul's. 154. My time has been too long spent in carping ;—but yet the faults which I have pointed out were such as could scarcely occur to you without some such indication, and which gravely need your observance, and, as far as you are accountable for them, your repentance. I can best briefly, in conclusion, define, what I would fain have illustrated at length, the charm, in this art of the Fireside, which you tacitly feel, and have every rational ground to rejoice in. With whatever restriction you should receive the flattery, and with whatever caution the guidance, of these great illustrators of your daily life, this at least you may thankfully recognize in the sum of their work, that it contains the evidence of a prevalent and crescent beauty and energy in the youth of our day, which may justify the most discontented "laudator temporis acti" in leaving the future happily in their hands. The witness of ancient art points often to a general and equal symmetry of body and mind in well-trained races; but at no period, so far as I am able to gather by the most careful comparison of existing portraiture, has there ever been a loveliness so variably 1 [The picture was, however, afterwards removed: see Vol. XXI. p. 170.] [Horace, Ars Poetica, 173.] XXXIII. 2 A |