Punch, or the London Charivari

Volume 105, August 5th 1893

edited by Sir Francis Burnand

THE DIRECTOR'S VADE MECUM.

• Question. What is your duty as a Director?
• Answer. To give my name to a prospectus.
• Q. Is there any necessary formality before making this donation?
• A. Yes; I am to accept a certain number of qualifying shares in the company obtaining the advantage of my directorial services.
• Q. Need you pay for these shares?
• A. With proper manipulation, certainly not.
• Q. What other advantages would you secure by becoming a Director?
• A. A guinea an attendance.
• Q. Anything else?
• A. A glass of sherry and a sandwich.
• Q. What are your duties at a Board Meeting?
• A. To shake hands with the Secretary, and to sign an attendance book.
• Q. What are your nominal duties?
• A. Have not the faintest idea.
• Q. Would it be right to include in your nominal duties the protection of the interests of the shareholders?
• A. As likely as not.
• Q. Would it be overstating the case to say that thousands and thousands of needy persons are absolutely ruined by the selfish inattention of a company's direction?
• A. Not at all—possibly understating it.
• Q. I suppose you never read a prospectus to which you put your name?
• A. Never.
• Q. Nor willingly wish to ruin any one?
• A. No; why should I?
• Q. You are guilty of gross ignorance and brutal indifference?
• A. Quite so.
• Q. And consequently know that, according to the view of the Judges, you are above the law?
• A. That is so.
• Q. And may therefore do what you like, without any danger to your own interests?
• A. To be sure.
• Q. And consequently will do what you best please, in spite of anything, and anybody?
• A. Why, certainly.

DIFFERENCE OF OPINION.

Stern Parent. "No wonder you look so Seedy and fit for nothing. I hear you came Home so very late last night!"

Youth (who is having his fling). "Beg your pardon, Dad, I did nothing of the sort. I came Home very early!"

At a meeting of the International Maritime Congress "M. Gatto read a paper on Harbour Lights." Does this mean that one of the Adelphoi Gatti read the paper (extract from the play, or perhaps a play-bill) on Harbour Lights, which was an Adelphi success? Of course one of "the Gatti's" would be in the singular "M. Gatto." The paper was much applauded, and Gatto prends le gâteau.

From Spirit Land.—The Spirits or Spooks from the vasty deep that can be called and will come when Stead-ily and persistently summoned will not be the first to speak. The "Spooks" well-bred rule of politeness is, "Don't spook till you're spooken to." Also, "A good Spook must be seen and not heard."

MUSIC FOR THE MULTITUDE;

Or, Belmont on the Embankment.

A Morality (adapted from the "Merchant of Venice") for Men in Municipal Authority.

["The music on the Embankment during the pressman's dinner-hour is a much more important matter than it seems to be. It would be a most beneficial institution for all indoor labourers; for it is not the long hours of labour—though they are bad enough—so much as its monotony that makes it so wearisome."—Mr. James Payn in "Our Note Book."]

Lorenzo . . A Journeyman Printer.

Jessica . . His "Young Woman."

Scene—The Thames Embankment Garden.

Lorenzo. Sweetheart, let's in; they may expect our coming.

And yet no matter:—why should we go in?

The Toffs at last, have had compassion on us,

Within the house, or office, mewed too long,

And bring our music forth into the air.

[They take a seat.

How bright the sunshine gleams on this Embankment!

Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears: soft green and Summer sunlight

Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica: look, how this green town-garden

Is thickly crowded with the young and old:

There's not the smallest child which thou behold'st

But by his movements shows his young heart sings,

As though poor kids were young eye'd cherubim:

Such love of music lives in simple souls;

But whilst grim pedants and fanatics sour

Have power to stop, they will not let us hear it!

[Musicians tune up.

Hullo! The Intermezzo. Like a hymn

With sweeter touches charming to the ear,

The soul's drawn home by music.

[Music.

Jessica. I'm always soothed like when I

hear nice music.

Lorenzo. The reason is your spirits are responsive.

For do but note a wild and wanton mob

Of rough young rascals, like unbroken colts,

Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and blaring loud,

Which shows the hot condition of their blood;

If they, perchance, but hear a brass-band sound,

Or harp and fiddle duet touch their ears,

Or even Punch's pan-pipe, or shrill "squeaker,"

You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,

Their wandering eyes turned to an earnest gaze,

By the sweet power of music: therefore poets

Tell us old Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods,

Since naught so blockish, hard, insensible,

But music for the time doth change his nature.

The man who would keep music to himself,

Grudging the mob all concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for Bedlam, not the County Council!

The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

And his affections cold as Arctic bergs.

Let no such man be trusted!—Mark the music!

(Left marking it attentively.)

A Northern Light.

(Dr. John Rae, the venerable and valiant Arctic Explorer, is dead.)

The Arctic Circle and far Hudson's Bay

Bear witness to the glories of John Rae.

The darkened world, with deep regret, will own

Another Rae of Light and Leading gone!

Mrs. R. thinks she will not go abroad for a holiday tour. "You see, my dear," she says, "I don't mind owning that I am not well up in French and German, and I should not like to have always to be travelling about with an Interrupter."

"THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE."

Design for a Stained-Glass Window for Westminster, By W. E. G.

["Would his right hon. friend excuse his suggesting an analogy of the character which he bore with that which was systematically assumed, he believed, under ancient rules, in the Court of Rome ... when it was proposed, in consequence of the peculiar excellence of some happy human being who had departed this life, to raise him ... to the order of the saints ... there was always brought into the Court a gentleman who went ... under the name of devil's advocate. His peculiar function was to go through the career of the proposed saint, to seize upon and magnify every human failing or error, to misconstrue everything that was capable of misconstruction.... That was the case of his right hon. friend."—Mr. Gladstone on Mr. Chamberlain.]

A TRIAL OF FAITH.

Bertie (at intervals). "I used to——What the——do a lot of——Conf——Rowing, one time!"

"THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE."

Old Parliamentary Pictor soliloquiseth:—

"As when a painter, poring on a face,

Divinely thro' all hindrance finds the man

Behind it, and so paints him that his face,

The shape and colour of a mind and life,

Lives for his children, ever at its best

And fullest."

Aye, my Alfred, there you hit

The portrait-painter's function to a hair;

And here I hit the essential inner Joe.

And so he'll live. But "ever at his best,

And fullest?" Humph! His Brummagem retinue

Will scarce acknowledge that. Some call him "Judas,"

But that is rude, and leads to shameful rows.

Chaff is one thing and insolence another;

E'en caricature may pass, so that its impulse

Be humorous not malevolent; but coarse spleen,

Taking crude shape in truthless graphic slander,

Is boyish work,—bad manners and bad art!

And so Tay Pay transgressed the bounds of taste,

And led to shameful shindy. Herod? Humph!

That flout "lacked finish," as great Dizzy said,

He pricked, not stabbed, was fencer, not brute-bruiser,

But he of Brummagem hath much to learn

In gentlemanly sword-play.

"Devil's Advocate!"

That hits him off, I think! Not Devil,—no!

(Though angry blunderheads will twist it that way)

But ruthless slater of the pseudo-saint!

The pseudo-saint, I own, looks limp and floppy,

Half-fledged and awkward at the cherub rôle.

Poor saint! He's had much mauling, must have more,

Ere he assumes the nimbus, and I would

That he looked less lop-sided. Yes, my Joe!

You'll spot some "human failings" I've no doubt.

To exercise your "double million magnifyin'

Gas microscopes of hextra power" upon.

Your "wision" is not "limited" by "deal doors"

Or "flights o' stairs," or friends, or facts, or fairness,

You hardly need suggestions diabolic

From that hook-nosed attorney at your elbow

To urge you to the attack; erect, alert,

Orchid-adorned, and eye-glass-armed, you stand

The sharpest, shrewdest, most acidulous,

Dapper and dauntless "Devil's Advocate"

That ever blackened a poor "saint" all over

Othello-wise, or robbed a postulant

For canonisation of a hopeful chance

Of full apotheosis, and the right

Of putting on the nimbus.

There, 'tis finished:

And—on the whole—'twere well I had not limned it!

'Twas tempting, yes, and pleasant in the painting,

But—well, I've paid for it, and much misdoubt

If it was worth the price. Followers applaud,

I—suffer. Oh, that mob of scuffling men,

Clawing and cursing, while the gallery hissed!

Hissed—not a pothouse outpour in full fight,

Not clamorous larrikins, or rowdy roughs

By prize-ring or on race-course fired with drink,

But England's Commons settling—with their fists

A Constitutional Contest! Shame, O shame!

And much I fear my Art must somewhat share the blame!

[Left lamenting.

FASHIONABLE INTELLIGENCE.

"Mrs. Tanqueray has left town."

They talk of Alexander

And Mrs. Tanque-ray,

Now who would raise my dander

Will just abuse that play.

For few there are

That can compare—

Well,—if so, give their names,—

With Mrs. Tanque-ray

Who has just gone away

From the Theatre of St. James.

Mrs. R. says that of all Shakspeare's plays produced at the Lyceum, she liked Henry the Eighth the best, because of the character of Cardinal Bullseye, which Mr. Irving played so sweetly.

Statues of the two New Parliamentary Giants to be Erected as Guarding the House of Commons.—Gag and Maygag.

Theatrical Pedestrian Match.—Match between two "Walking Gentlemen." Date not yet fixed. Stake-holder "Walker, London."

A VISIT TO BORDERLAND.

I called on Mr. Stead last week, at least I seemed to call,

For in this "visionary" world one can't be sure at all;

And when I reached the great man's house he shook me by the hand,

And talked, as only Stead can talk, of Spooks and Borderland,

I own that I was tired of men who live upon the earth,

They hadn't recognised, I felt, my full and proper worth;

"They'll judge me much more fairly," I reflected, "when they're dead,—

So I'll go and seek an interview with William Thomas Stead."

The reason why I went to Stead is this: the great and good

Has lately found that English ghosts are much misunderstood;

Substantial man may swagger free, but, spite of all his boasts,

STEAD holds there is a future, and a splendid one, for ghosts.

And so he has an office, a sort of ghostly Cook's,

Where tours may be contracted for to Borderland and Spooks;

And those who yearn to mix with ghosts have only got to go

And talk, as I conversed, with Stead for half an hour or so.

The ghosts have got a paper too, the Borderland I spoke of,

Where raps and taps are registered that scoffers make a joke of:

A medium's magazine it is, a ghostly gazetteer

Produced by William Thomas Stead, the Julianic seer.

And everything that dead men do to help the men who live,

The chains they clank, the sighs they heave, the warnings that they give,

The coffin-lids they lift at night when folk are tucked in bed,

Are all set down in black and white by William Thomas Stead.

While wide-awake he sees such shapes as others merely dream on;

For instance there is Julia, a sort of female dæmon;

Like some tame hawk she stoops to him, she perches on his wrist—

In life she was a promising, a lady journalist;

And now that death has cut her off she leaves the ghostly strand

And turns her weekly copy out by guiding William's hand.

Yet, oh, it makes me writhe like one who sits him down on tin tacks

To note that happy ghost's contempt for grammar and for syntax.

Well, well, I called on Stead, you know; a doctor's talk of diet is,

And Stead's was of his psychic food as cure for my anxieties.

I thought I'd take a chair to sit (it looked to me quite common) on,

"You can't sit there," observed the Sage; "that's merely a phenomenon."

Two ladies, as I entered, seemed expressing of their gratitudes

For help received to Mr. Stead in sentimental attitudes;

They saw me, pirouetted twice, then vanished with a high kick.

"It's nothing," said the Editor; "they are not real, but psychic."

These things, I own, surprised me much; I fidgetted uneasily;

"Why, bless the man, he's had a shock!" said Mr. Stead, quite breezily.

"We do these things the whole year round, it's merely knack to do them;

A man who does them every day gets quite accustomed to them.

This room of mine is full of ghosts,"—it sounded most funereal—

"I've only got to say the word to make them all material.

I'll say it promptly, if you wish; they cannot well refuse me."

But my eagerness had vanished, and I begged him to excuse me.

"Now Julia," he continued, "is in many ways a rum one,

But, whatever else they say of her, they can't say she's a dumb one.

She speaks—she's speaking now," he said. "I wonder what she'll tell us.

What's that? She says she likes your looks; she wants to make me jealous."

That gave me pause, and made me think 'twas fully time I went; it is

A fearful thing to fascinate these bodiless non-entities.

Of course when people go to Rome they act like folk at Rome, you know,

But flirting didn't suit my book—I've got a wife at home, you know.

Well, next I felt a gust of wind, "That's Colonel Bones," my host said;

"He's dropped his helmet" (think of that, a helmet on a ghost's head).

"I don't much care," he whispered this, "in fact, I can't endure him;

Dragoons do use such awful words; I've tried in vain to cure him."

I ventured to suggest to Stead that rather than be bluffed I

Would make this cursing soldier-ghost turn out in psychic mufti;

He couldn't drop his helmet then, nor threaten with his sabre.

"I've tried to," said the Editor, "it's only wasted labour.

"I've sought advice," continued Stead, "from Cantuar and Ebor,

They hinted that they couldn't stand a she-ghost and a he-bore.

I tried to get a word or two from men of arts and letters,

They said they drew the line at Spooks who made a noise with fetters.

And when I talked of bringing men and ghostly shapes together

The Bishops tapped their foreheads and conversed about the weather.

In fact"—he grew quite petulant—"in all this world's immensity

I'd back the Bench of Bishops to beat the rest in density."

And so he talked, till suddenly—(perhaps he's talking still;

In talking of his own affairs, he has a wondrous skill)—

There came a noise, as if Old Bones had let off all his blanks at once,

As if a thousand theorists were turning all their cranks at once;

It seemed to lift me off my legs, and seize me by the hair,

And sweep me mute but terrified through all the spook-filled air.

And, when I got my senses back, I vowed no more to tread

The paths that lead to Borderland, nor ask advice of Stead.

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

Pietro Ghisleri is another success for that charming writer Marion Crawford. The style is everything. The story is not of so thrilling a nature as to be absorbing, but it is sufficiently interesting—for the Baron, at least, with whom M.C.—"Master of his Craft"—is a great favourite. "Odd, though," murmurs the Baron to himself, and he seldom murmurs about anything; "odd that a writer like our Marion should, in Vol. II., p. 35, pen such a sentence as this: "There are plenty of others whom you may care for more than I." Of course the author intends Maddalena del' Armi, who utters these words, to convey to her listener and to the reader that "There are plenty of others for whom you may care more than (you care) for me." How does "than I" get into this sentence, unless it is to mean "There are plenty of others for whom you may care more than I care for them"—quod est absurdum." It is unfortunate that the pivot on which the plot turns is so highly improbable as to be almost impossible, for is it not most unlikely that any Catholic, educated or uneducated, should ever write her confession to her confessor, and send it by post, instead of going to him, and making it by word of mouth? She must have known that, in so doing, she was making no confession at all, i.e., in the restrictedly religious sense of the word. While she was about it, she might as well have inclosed a stamped and addressed envelope for the absolution to be sent by return. This is the hinge of the story; and it is a very weak one. Mr. Crawford recognises this when his other characters casually discuss the probability of Adèle's having done such a thing. However, grant this, which is almost as easily done as granting superhuman strength to a Ouidaesque hero, and the book—in three of Macmillan's blue volumes—is fascinating. Such is the candid opinion of The Baron de Book-worms.

THE SPIRIT LEVEL.

Relentless Youth. "'Ullo 'ere, Guv'nor, What 'yer up to naow? Tykin' a Hordnance Surwey o' the District, I suppose!!"

TO A PARISIENNE.

["Paris est le centre du bon goût."—Les Précieuses Ridiculis, Scène X.]

By Jove, what festive tints you wear, chère Madame!

These fin-de-siècle furbelows of la dame

Would scare the very simply dressed Père Adam.

On you they're charming;

But when the fashion spreads to distant quarters,

And far across the Channel's choppy waters

They glow on England's humble, tasteless daughters,

They'll be alarming.

Bright blue, gay green, loud lilac, yelling yellow—

Yelling for criard, pray forgive a fellow

For using words that time has not turned mellow—

Must not be worse made

Than in your costumes, gracefully assorted.

Think what these tints will be, transposed, distorted,

By English laundress, flower-girl, and sported

By cook or nursemaid!

Our eyes! Oh, save them then with shades or goggles!

For reason totters on its throne, which joggles.

In choosing tints the Englishwoman boggles;

"Chacun à son goût."

You're always comme il faut from boots to bonnet.

For Paris, praised in song, and ode, and sonnet,

Is still, as when les Précieuses doated on it,

"Le centre du bon goût."

Merry Margit!"—"I was at Margate last July," sang Thomas Barham, when telling of the Little Vulgar Boy, and so were we, this July, for the purpose of passing a few happy hours at the renovated Cliftonville Hotel under the government of Mr. Holland, vice-regent for Messrs. Gordon & Co. No need now to quit the shores of England for Antwerp, Rotterdam, or any other of the Rotterdamerung Cycle, as visitors to Margate will, on our own shore, find Holland. In the menu Sauce Hollandaise is avoided, and Politesse Hollandaise is substituted, to the satisfaction of everybody.

"Voilà ce que l'on dit de moi

Dans la Gazette de Hollande!"

Which couplet the Manageress might sing, as they are words from The Grand Dutchess.