Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 4 of 4.—1892-1914

FINE ARTS, DRAMA AND MUSIC

I have noticed in earlier volumes with what asperity Punch assailed the conventionalities of academic and Royal Academic Art; how he became, for a while at any rate, a convert to Pre-Raphaelitism; how, later on, the exhibitors at the Grosvenor Gallery superseded the exponents of fashionable orthodoxy at Burlington House as the targets of his satire; and with what unremitting and undiscriminating zeal he "belaboured" all representatives of the Æsthetic movement. The further progress of this reaction can be traced throughout the first half of the period now under review. In the 'nineties Aubrey Beardsley was his special bête noire; in the early years of the new century the Impressionist school, and by 1910 the Post-Impressionists, furnish him with unfailing matter for caricature. It was not that those who stood on the old ways were exempt from criticism. Year after year the annual summer show at Burlington House never failed to receive a punctual tribute from pen and pencil. But for the most part these notices are inspired by irresponsible frivolity – a desire to extract fun by burlesquing the titles and subjects and treatment quite foreign to the spirit in which Punch had addressed himself to the task in the 'fifties, and even later. The private view of the Academy became for Punch an annual excuse for an explosion of punning, and the illustrations were a faithful counterpart of the text. Yet criticism occasionally emerges from this carnival of jocularity, as when Mr. Sargent's cavalier treatment of details is noted in 1895; or when Punch in 1902 suggests that the formidable congestion of pictures at the R.A. might be relieved by hanging some of them in the refreshment room; or when he writes in 1904: —

An interesting exhibit at the Royal Academy is a drawing executed by the artist when he was only sixteen years of age. Quite a feature of the show, too, is the number of pictures by artists over that age which have the appearance of having been painted by artists under that age.

In 1908 Punch satirized a then prevalent fashion in his drawing of the "Problem Room" at Burlington House, crowded with perplexed spectators dropping their solutions into a box marked "Puzzle Picture Syndicate." When the "Rokeby Venus" was damaged by a militant suffragist in 1914, Punch suggested that the offender ought to be made to serve her term of imprisonment in the Royal Academy – a remark quite in the spirit of his old art-critic, Charles Eastlake.

The oblique and ironical method is admirably employed in the dramatized conversations of visitors to the Academy and other exhibitions. In the sketch "Round the R.A." in 1893 the schoolmistress and her bored pupils, the complacent Briton giving himself away at every turn to his French friend, and the prosaic and practical person, are all drawn from the quick. The orthodox verdict is "quite up to the average – such delightful puppies and kittens," while the rebellious pupil of the edifying Miss Pemmican remarks, "Bother the beastly old Academy. I wish it was burnt, I do!"

From the same hand, seventeen years later, comes an equally illuminating sketch of the visitors to the Grafton Galleries – art-student, precious young painter, young City man, high-brow critic, matter-of-fact lady, and the frank and immortal Philistine only moved to unseemly mirth when his friend remarks, "Drawing to the Synthesist is entirely unimportant in solving the problem how the artist may best express his own temperament." Punch often found himself driven into the ranks of the Philistines in self-defence; anyhow, he always preferred the way of Gath to that of gush. In "An Old Master's Growl" in 1895 the speaker declares that the mass of the people only enjoyed the annual summer show; the few who came to see the Old Masters mostly came to be seen. But the ancients were not annoyed, it was only what they expected: —

 
We expect it – I said just as much to Vandyck —
There's but one in a hundred that comes who'll descry
The Beauty of Art. It's the sham I dislike:
Well – good-bye!
 

Leighton and Millais

From the other end of the scale comes another "growl" in the same year – that of the professional model, in Phil May's picture, against Burne-Jones who had recently made a drawing of Labour for the Daily Chronicle: "I reckon 'e'll be on the pavement next." Personalities, rather than principles or theories, interested Punch at this period, and in 1896 and 1897 the circle of his eminent Victorian friends was reduced by the passing of three ornaments of British Art, all of them Academicians and two successively presidents of the Academy. Of the two sets of verses on Leighton, the second is much the better. Punch takes for his text Watts's saying that Leighton had painted many pictures, but that his life was nobler than them all: —

 
Noblesse oblige: his manners matched his art;
Fine painter-skill, the bearing of a prince.
 

The writer alludes to the malignant disparagement indulged in by his detractors and sums up: —

 
Great if not quite among the greatest, here
A noble artist of a noble life
Rests with a fame that lives, and need not fear
Detraction or the hour's ephemeral strife.
 

Leighton's generosity and munificence to brother artists deserved all and more than all that Punch said: his fame as an artist has hardly borne out the prediction of the last couplet. Sir John Millais, his successor, was linked by more intimate ties from the days of Once a Week. Du Maurier was one of his dearest friends, and Punch claimed to have been alone, save for the Spectator, in acclaiming the genius of his early work. As he happily says, "from P.R.B, to P.R.A. – that tale is worth the telling." Millais only lived a few months to enjoy his honour, and on his death in the summer of 1896 Punch dwelt on his triple endowment of health, heartiness and power, his entirely English spirit, his mastery as a painter, and his genius for friendship.

Sir John Gilbert, who died a year later, was an old comrade and contributor. He had designed the fourth wrapper in January, 1843 – Doyle's final design was not adopted till six years later – and contributed intermittently to Punch down to 1882. His robust and spirited talent as an illustrator is acknowledged in Punch's tribute: —

 
The faded history of courts and kings
Touched by your spell took on its former hue;
You made the daily art of common things
Fresh as the morning dew.
 

A deeper note is sounded in Punch's salutation of Watts on his death in 1904, when he recognizes the fidelity of that illustrious artist to his conception of the high mission of Art and his well-known repudiation of the maxim "Art for Art's Sake": —

 
His means were servants to the end in view
And not the end's self; so his heart was wise
To hold – as they have held, the chosen few —
High failure dearer than the easy prize.
 
 
Now lifted face to face with unseen things,
Dimly imagined in the lower life,
He sees his Hope renew her broken strings,
And Love and Death no more at bitter strife.
 

Punch on Aubrey Beardsley

To retrace our steps to the 'nineties, it must be admitted that Punch enjoyed himself more in belabouring Beardsley than in saluting established reputations. Seeing nothing in his work but a wilful, exotic and decadent bizarrerie, Punch assailed him under various aliases, all of them grotesque and uncomplimentary. In 1893 the famous Beardsley "poster" for the Avenue Theatre inspired the lines headed "Ars Postera," which begin: —

 
Mr. Aubrey Beer de Beers,
You're getting quite a high renown;
Your Comedy of Leers, you know,
Is posted all about the town;
This sort of stuff I cannot puff,
As Boston says, it makes me "tired":
Your Japanee-Rossetti girl
Is not a thing to be desired.
 
 
Mr. Aubrey Beer de Beers,
New English Art (excuse the chaff)
Is like the Newest Humour style,
It's not a thing at which to laugh:
But all the same, you need not maim
A beauty reared on Nature's rules;
A simple maid au naturel
Is worth a dozen spotted ghouls.
 

On being presented with artful and crafty puzzle by artistic friend. (Query – Is it the right way up? And, if so, what is it?)

Punch pursued his pet aversion from pillar to post – or poster – with caricatures of his types, compared to "Stygian Sphinxes, Chimæras in soot, problems in Euclid gone mad." Mr. Beardsley, however, was not the only emancipated artist who came under Punch's lash. In a notice of an Exhibition at the Dudley Gallery, Mr. Sickert's picture of "The Sisters Lloyd" prompts the comment, "To be more original than the originals is to paint the piccalilli and gild the refined ginger-bread." By 1901 Punch had become much impressed and exasperated by the modern cult of ugliness, and in 1902 began the first of a succession of travesties of modern impressionist art – "The Garden Party," "The Picnic," "A Dutch Landscape," in which all the negligible features are accentuated and the important ones left out. Another ingenious series belonging to the same year is that of illustrations of "Mary had a Little Lamb" in the style of Marcus Stone, Goodall, Clausen, Alma-Tadema, Dana Gibson, Albert Moore, John Collier, Briton Rivière, etc. These are executed in a spirit of friendly burlesque, very different from the notice of Mr. Gordon Craig's drawings, which is a masterpiece of adroit belittlement. "His drawing-power as an actor," we read, "is only equalled by his drawing-power as an artist"; and Punch kindly recommends him "to confine, or extend, his art almost entirely to designing nursery wall-papers."

The exuberances of "nouveau art" had already elicited the cry of the visitor (in Du Maurier's picture in 1894) on being shown round her friend's new house: "Oh, Liberty, how many crimes are committed in thy name!" – a joke repeated from an earlier volume.⁸ Nine years later the angularities of the new "Artful and Crafty" furniture are held up to well-merited ridicule. But it is only right to add that in 1897, in "The Pendulum of Taste" – an imaginative forecast of the sale of old furniture in the year 1996 —Punch indulges in a comprehensive and entirely damaging review of the monstrosities of Victorian furniture and decoration: groups of fruit in wax; hideous gaseliers; terrible chromolithographs; a tea-cosy embroidered with holly-berries in crewel work; a kneeling statuette of the infant Samuel; chairs and sofa in mahogany, upholstered in horsehair; a Kidderminster carpet "with a striking design of large nosegays on a ground of green moss"; and a complete set of antimacassars in wool and crochet. Mr. Galsworthy's minute description of the "Mausoleum," in which old Timothy Forsyte, the last and most long-lived of his generation, lived or rather vegetated down to and through the War, is much on the same lines. But Punch, being nearly twice as old as Mr. Galsworthy, had spent a good part of his life amid these surroundings.

Art Definitions

The principles and theory of art-criticism, as I have noted above, did not trouble Punch greatly in the first twelve or fifteen years of this period. He was mainly concerned with the robust expression of his likes and dislikes. But by 1908 he had become slightly infected by the new psychology of art, and by way of clarifying the atmosphere launched the following list of definitions: —

ART

(A glossary for the opening of the R.A.)

An Artist is a person who paints what he thinks he sees.

An Amateur is a person who thinks he paints what he sees.

An Impressionist is a person who paints what other people think he sees.

A Popular Artist is a person who paints what other people think they see.

A Successful Artist is a person who paints what he thinks other people see.

A Great Artist is a person who paints what other people see they think.

A Failure is a person who sees what other people think they paint.

A Portraitist is a person who paints what other people don't think he sees.

A Landscape Painter is a person who doesn't paint what other people see.

A Realist is a person who sees what other people don't paint.

An Idealist is a person who paints what other people don't see.

The Hanging Committee are people who don't see what other people think they paint.

A Royal Academician is a person who doesn't think and paints what other people see.

A Genius is a person who doesn't see and paints what other people don't think.

A Critic is a person who doesn't paint and thinks what other people don't see.

The Public are people who don't see or think what other people don't paint.

A Dealer is a person that sees that people who paint don't think, and who thinks that people who don't paint don't see. He sees people who don't see people who paint; he thinks that people who paint don't see people who see; and he sees what people who don't paint think.

FINALLY

A Reader is a person whose head swims.

The art critics accredited to the daily Press, like their musical colleagues, could no longer be accused of lagging behind the modernist tendencies of the times: they aspired to be in the van of progress. In 1913 Punch burlesques the wonderful phraseology of The Times art critic in one of his "Studies of reviewers," which deals with the exhibitors at the Neo-British Art League. It may suffice to quote the appreciations of Mme. Strulda Brugh and Mr. Marcellus Thom. The method of the former, as illustrated by her "Pekinese Puppies," is contrasted with that of the Congestionist school in that she "deanthropomorphizes her scheme of pigmentation into nodules of aplanatic voluminosity": —

When therefore we have to assume a fluorescent reticulation of the interstitial sonorities, a situation is developed which might well baffle any but an advanced expert in transcendental mathematics. As a result the modelling of the puppies' tails is lacking in curvilinear conviction; their heads fail in canine suggestiveness, their fore-paws in prehensile subjectivity.

Mr. Marcellus Thom's "Sardine Fishers in the Adriatic," executed in "creosoted truffle stick," is a masterpiece of "suppressed but dignified antinomianism": —

Wonderful though the drawing and the interfiltration of coordinating paraboloids are, it is the psychological content of the picture rather than its direct presentative significance which affects the solar plexus of the enlightened onlooker. The whole atmosphere is summarized and condensed in a circumambient and oleaginous aura… To do full justice to such a picture is unhappily beyond the resources of the most sublime preciosity. It demands the εσωτερικη πφλαρια of Theopompus of Megalocrania or even the intima desipientia distilled in the Atopiad of Vesanus Sanguinolentus.

The new spirit in Art had already been burlesqued by one of Punch's artists in a series of "intelligent anticipations" of the work of Herkomer, Sargent, Leader and La Thangue as executed in the Futuristic Style; and again in Mr. Haselden's Paulo-Post-Impressionist portraits of various celebrities in the Almanack for 1913. In the same year Mr. Sargent's decision to withdraw from portraiture is commemorated in a fancy picture of "an old Chelsea Gateway," where, beneath the name "John S. Sargent" hangs a notice, "No Bottles, No Circulars, No Hawkers, No Portraits." Here, I may add, that Punch had, three years earlier, with the aid of Mr. George Morrow's ingenious pencil, duly chronicled the decay of flattery in contemporary portrait painting.

Three notable additions to the Art Galleries of London were made during this period. The opening of the National Portrait Gallery, in 1896, is recorded in Sambourne's picture of Britannia welcoming British worthies to their new home: "at last we can give you a roof over your heads." The Tate Gallery, opened in the following year, is welcomed with a profusion of puns on the name of the donor; and the installation of the Wallace Collection at Hertford House, in 1900, prompts the observation that "millions after all have their utility." The sensational abduction and recovery of the famous portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire impelled Punch to cry, "Vive la Grande Duchesse!" over the "loss and Gain-sborough picture." Another famous portrait of a Duchess – Holbein's superb Christina of Milan – was in danger of being permanently lost to England in 1909, when Punch, in "Hans across the sea," portrayed an American dealer with a bag of dollars dragging the Duchess away with the comment: "Once aboard the liner, and the gyurl is mine!" The peril, however, was averted, and Christina still remains with us in London.

Tenniel, Phil May and Sambourne

I do not suppose that any of the honours which have fallen to his staff ever gave Punch more unfeigned satisfaction than the knighthood bestowed on Tenniel in 1893. The "Black-and-White Knight," as Punch then called him, did not quit the "Table" until 1901, when he had been a member for fifty years, and the public dinner given in his honour, with Mr. Balfour in the chair, was a national tribute to a great gentleman and great artist. On his death in 1914 the special "Tenniel" number, with personal tributes from his colleagues, was a wonderful memorial of the work of one who "nothing common drew or mean." Tenniel was the Nestor of Punch's staff. When the copyright of Alice in Wonderland expired, a number of artists laid hands on the text, to the disgust of Punch, who regarded this attempt to supplant Tenniel's illustrations as little less than an act of sacrilege. The situation is happily dealt with in Mr. Reed's picture of Alice, surrounded with Tenniel's figures, contemplating the antics of the interlopers, and asking, "Who are these funny little people?" The Hatter replies: "Your Majesty, they are our imitators"; and Alice rejoins: "Curiouser and curiouser." Phil May was only thirty-nine when he died in 1903, and left a gap never quite filled as a brilliant, humorous and masterly delineator of street life and of modern Alsatia. Phil May, who was the soul of modesty and gentleness, and had no enemy in the world but himself, once said, "Everything I know I learnt from 'Sammy.'" "Sammy," as all his colleagues called Linley Sambourne, who succeeded Tenniel as chief cartoonist, was the greatest pride and pleasure of the Table until his death in 1910, and affection and regret still keep his memory green. When one compares his early with his later work, one is inclined to assert that none of Punch's artists ever made more astonishing progress in their art. And for the rest I can only echo what one of his colleagues wrote on his passing: "While Art has lost a noble, sincere and devoted servant, we have lost our merriest friend."

Dutiful Nephew (doing the sights of London for the benefit of his aunt from the country): "This is the famous 'Minotaur,' by Watts. What do you think of it?"

Aunt: "Well, it's a short-horn, whatever else it may be!"

DRAMA, OPERA, MUSIC

The period which began with the triumphs of the late Mr. Penley, and ended with those of Mr. Ainley, was more remarkable for dramatic alarums, excursions, innovations, inventions and discoveries than any of those dealt with in my previous volumes. If one were asked to single out the most remarkable event in British Theatrical history in those twenty-two years, pre-eminence might fairly be awarded to the establishment and fruitful work of the repertory theatres in the provinces – Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Dublin. I mentioned in an earlier volume Punch's generous tribute to Calvert's services in Manchester, but if we except his references to the Irish players, little or nothing is said of this decentralizing movement. Where the theatre was concerned Punch, as in many other ways, was first and foremost a Londoner. But, with this reserve, most of the outstanding features of the drama and its presentation are recorded and commented on in his pages. New dramatic luminaries shot into his sphere, some of them too wildly to suit his Victorian tastes. Ibsen remained for a while as his chief bogy and butt, but was supplanted, as a target for caricature, by Maeterlinck, and to a certain extent by Rostand. But as time went on Punch was even more preoccupied with the experiments and achievements of native playwrights. The revival of the poetic or literary drama associated chiefly with the works of the late Mr. Stephen Phillips, met with a not unsympathetic reception at his hands. Mr. Shaw worried him from the very outset, but there is no notice of Arms and the Man in 1894, in which, by the way, Mr. Bernard Partridge, as Mr. Bernard Gould, greatly distinguished himself before he abandoned the boards for black-and-white. Punch contemptuously dismisses the piece with two lines and two villainous puns: "''Ave a New Piece?' They've got it at the Avenue. A shawt criticism on it is 'Pshaw! Absurd!'" It was only by slow degrees that Punch came to recognize the vivacity, the wit and the originality which redeemed Mr. Shaw's perversity, his lapses from taste and his consistent defiance of tradition and convention. It was, if my memory serves me aright, one of Punch's young men who was responsible for a poem, recited at a dinner of the Stage Society, which contained the couplet: —

 
And if The Lady from the Sea seems foreign,
For British matrons there is Mrs. Warren.
 

A Short Way with Shaw

Towards Barrie as a playwright Punch was at first much less benevolent than he had been to Barrie the novelist, and Mr. Granville Barker's plays depressed more than they impressed him. But for rather more than half the period under review Punch's critiques of plays were primarily a medium for jocular comment, for fun at all costs, for explosions of puns. As a devotee of cheerfulness he resented gloom; as a professional humorist he found himself out of touch with a good deal of the new humour, the new whimsicality, the new wit. These editorial limitations were made good by the oblique methods of parody adopted with brilliant results by some of his collaborators, but it is not too much to say that theatrical criticism was never so impartially and tactfully conducted as under the fifth editor of Punch, the only one who had never written for the stage.

Turning from the creative aspect of the drama to the organization and regulation of the theatre, we have to notice two important factors, one of which was increasingly active throughout these years. Societies for the production of new, and the revival of old plays on a non-commercial basis were already in existence, but an impetus was given to the movement by the establishment of the Independent Theatre by Mr. Grein in the 'nineties, and the Stage Society and other similar bodies have carried it on with undiminished vigour down to the present time. These activities did not always commend themselves to Punch, but at least he did not ignore them.

Arrival of Actor-Manager, Leading Lady, and other members of the cast.

Then there was the Censorship. The Lord Chamberlain intervened pretty frequently in the 'nineties where plays dealing with Scriptural motives came under his scrutiny. Maeterlinck's Mona Vanna was barred on moral grounds, and in 1907 the apparently blameless Mikado was temporarily withdrawn for political reasons. It must be admitted that in these years Punch was less inclined to criticize these interventions when they were aimed at the frank discussion of disagreeable themes than when they sought to restrict the unseemly vivacities of the Variety Stage – witness his continued hostility to the L.C.C. in regard to their licensing policy and his comments on the Puritan protests against the programme at the Empire in 1894. An altered mood, however, is distinctly revealed in a cartoon in 1907 where the Censor is shown preferring the claims of musical comedy to those of the serious drama, and Punch's sympathies are clearly with the latter. Since then, though Scriptural and political plays have not always escaped the ban, restrictions on the didactic drama, where it deals with the "social evil," have been largely withdrawn in deference to modern conceptions of the needs of education and the responsibilities of the State.

English Plays and Foreign Players

To go back to 1893, the three plays which Punch specially singled out for approval were Charley's Aunt, Becket and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. The nearest approach to criticism is to be found in the notice of the first-named piece, in which, while admitting that Penley was "inimitably and irresistibly funny" throughout two hours of "all but continuous merriment," the writer lays his finger on a real blot – the intrusion of cheap sentimentality. Tennyson's Becket is pronounced a great and genuine success, both for Irving and the author, who had treated the story "with a free hand, a poetic touch and a liberal mind." The opening sentences of the notice, however, illustrate Punch's insuperable inclination to succumb to frivolity. "Becket has beaten the record": and he goes on to speculate how Thomas à Becket would have beaten The Record if that paper had existed in his time and had ventured to criticize him.

The Second Mrs. Tanqueray might be too strong meat for the young person, but it "marked an epoch in our dramatic annals," it was "every inch a play," and revealed in Mrs. Patrick Campbell an actress of exceptional gifts. There is a delightful burlesque of Ibsen in "Pill Doctor Herdal," but Punch did not leave well alone, and in another number furiously denounced The Master Builder (which he had read but not seen). "Of all the weak-kneed, wandering, effeminate, unwholesome, immoral, dashed rot (to quote Lord Arthur Pomeroy in The Pantomime Rehearsal) this is the weak-kneed-est," and so on in the superlative degree with all the other epithets of abuse. This was the year in which Madame Duse made her London début, but Punch did not get beyond a few puns on her name. The visit of Got, Mlle. Reichemberg and other representatives of the Comédie Française is treated less cavalierly, and the rumoured reconciliation of Gilbert and Sullivan suggests the possibilities of a new "Savoy Peace" – "the Reunion of Arts." Sarah Bernhardt, Yvette Guilbert and Réjane were the three bright particular foreign stars in 1894. Sarah Bernhardt was, as we know, an old flame of the susceptible Punch, and though he found Ize l the reverse of exhilarating, homage was paid to the golden voice of the heroine in a graceful cartoon of "Sarah Chrysostoma." Réjane in Madame Sans-Gêne comes in for high but not unqualified praise. She was perfect in the last act, but overdid the canaillerie of her farce in earlier passages, or at least Punch thought so. His tribute to Yvette Guilbert, "the Queen of the 'Café Concert,'" killed two birds with one stone, for it took the form of a very neat and witty adaptation of her famous song, "Les Vierges," at the expense of the "unco' guid" of Glasgow, whose Puritanism had recently aroused the protest of Sir Frederic Leighton and other Academicians: —

 
Ils défendent tous les desseins
Où l'on peut voir les bras, le sein,
à Glasgow.
Jamais nus; même dans un bain
Sont-ils tout habillés enfin?
(Parlé) Matin! A Glasgow.
 
 
Portez des lunett's; l'oeil nu
Est absolûment défendu
à Glasgow.
Des corps nus ils n'ont jamais vus
Là, où leurs raisonn'ments sont plus
(Parlé) Cornus! A Glasgow.
 

Irving's Knighthood

The closing of the Empire Theatre on the score of the improper character of the performances inspired a cartoon in which "Miss Prowlina Pry" (the L.C.C.) "hopes she doesn't intrude." The accompanying verses, protesting against the action of the new Bumbledom, compare unfavourably in their heavy-heeled satire with the verses quoted above. Ada Rehan in Twelfth Night is a pleasant memory to middle-aged playgoers. Punch did not acquit her Viola of a certain restlessness, but acknowledged that at times she acted like one inspired. To the same year belongs his tribute to the "imitative charms" of Cissie Loftus in a set of verses alluding to her imitations of May Yohé, Florence St. John, Jane May, Yvette Guilbert and Letty Lind, names that bear witness to the "fugacity" of the years and the transitoriness of stage popularity.

Mrs. Parvenu: "I don't know that I'm exactly gorne on Shakespeare plays."

(Mr. P. agrees.)

In 1895 Punch waxed lyrical over Tree as Svengali and Miss Dorothea Baird in the title rôle of the dramatized version of Trilby. He bestowed the "highest order of histrionic merit" on Irving for his Corporal Brewster in Conan Doyle's Story of Waterloo, and, in the cartoon recording his knighthood, congratulated him in the name of the profession through the mouth of David Garrick. Pinero's play, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, is described as "a drama of inaction" owing to the length of the speeches, but praise is liberally bestowed on Hare, Forbes-Robertson and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. The popularity of a now forgotten work of advanced fiction —Keynotes, by "George Egerton" – is attested by Punch's perversion of the title of the piece into "The Key-note-orious Mrs. Ebbsmith." The revival of Romeo and Juliet served as the occasion for jest seasoned with shrewdness: —

Mrs. Patrick Campbell's "Juliet" takes the poison but not the cake. Her "Juliet" has over her the shadow of Paula Tanqueray… Watching Forbes Robertson as "Romeo" I could not help thinking what an excellent "Hamlet" he would make; perhaps when I see him in that character I shall remember how good he was in "Romeo."

Cymbeline was the next of the Shakespearean revivals, and its production at the Lyceum, with Irving as Iachimo and Ellen Terry as Imogen, prompted eulogies of the performance and a burlesque of the plot. Mrs. Stirling (Lady Gregory), famous in her prime as Peg Woffington, incomparable in her old age as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, awakened gracious memories in Punch when she died at the close of 1895. Sir Augustus Harris was little more than half her age when his crowded and in the main prosperous life ended some six months later. The memorial verses to "Druriolanus," the ingenious agnomen of Punch's coining, render full justice to one who began as an indifferent melodramatic actor and ended as a successful impresario, and throughout served "amusement's motley world" with unfailing energy and resourcefulness. But to call him the Showman and Solon of the stage was at once to exaggerate his defects and his merits.