Mr. Punch's History of Modern England (Vol. 1-4). Charles L. Graves
ophicleides, cymbals, and gongs
At first thou didst wisely begin,
And bang the dull ears of the popular throngs,
As though 'twere to beat music in.
With national measures of France,
With polka, with waltz, and with jig,
The "gents" thou excitedst to caper and dance,
As Orpheus did ox, ass, and pig.
Then, leading them on, by degrees,
To a feeling for Genius and Art,
Thou mad'st them to feel that Beethoven could please,
And that all was not "slow" in Mozart.
John Hullah
The end of the poor "Mons" was pitiful. He was, when he chose to lay aside his mountebankery, an excellent and inspiring conductor. But he was hopelessly extravagant and improvident, and always in money difficulties. In the fire which destroyed Covent Garden Theatre in 1856 he lost all his musical library and other possessions, and a disastrous venture at the Royal Surrey Gardens completed his ruin. There is no "ridicule" in the tribute paid to the unlucky Jullien in the autumn of 1857, when Punch describes him as "a most worthy fellow, at whose eccentricities I have made good fun in his days of glory, but whom I have always recognized as a true artist and a true friend to art." But things went from bad to worse with the eccentric artist, and Jullien died bankrupt and insane in a lunatic asylum in Paris in 1860, at the age of forty-eight.
Another musical pioneer on far more orthodox lines whom Punch recognized was John Hullah, whose singing classes for the people at Exeter Hall in 1842 prompted the comment: "If music for the people be a fine moral pabulum, is the drama for the people to be considered of no value whatever?" More sympathetic is the reference, under the heading of "Io Bacche," to the performance of Bach's Mass in B minor at one of Hullah's monthly concerts in St. Martin's Hall in March, 1851. Hullah, who devoted his life to popular instruction in vocal music, well deserved the commendation: no fewer than 25,000 pupils passed through his singing classes between 1840 and 1860. The standard of taste in vocal music was not high in the early 'forties: Punch satirizes the prevalent sentimentality in songs by suggesting in 1842 as a title "Brush back that briny tear." On the instrumental side we have to note the entrance of the banjo in the same year. Musical eccentricities and monstrosities are duly noted. There seems to have been a special effervescence of them in 1856, when a performer who hammered out tunes on his chin, and Picco, the blind Sardinian penny whistler, enjoyed a fleeting popularity. In the same year American negro dialect ballads were much in vogue, a tyranny from which we are not yet relieved. The concertina became fashionable much earlier, in 1844, owing to the remarkable performances of the Italian virtuoso Giulio Regondi, but is seldom heard nowadays outside of music halls. Turgenieff said that the zither always reminded him of a Jew trying to sing through his nose. Without going so far as that, one may say that it would be hard to carry out Sir Edward Elgar's favourite expression-mark nobilmente on the concertina. With regard to fashionable music Punch complains in 1849 that execution was everything, composition little or nothing. He only anticipated the complaint of a later satirist who wrote:—
Spare, execution, spare thy victim's bones—
Composed by Mozart, decomposed by Jones.
MANNERS AND CVSTOMS OF YE ENGLYSHE IN 1849
A FEW FRIENDS TO TEA AND A LYTTLE MVSYCK
TASTE IN 1854—VILLIKINS AND HIS DINAH IN THE DRAWING-ROOM
Young Lady (who ought to know better): "Now, William, you are not low enough yet. Begin again at 'he took the cold pizen.'"
"Punch's" Taste in Music
Specimens of fashionable musical criticism have already been given under the head of opera. Punch had the root of the matter in him but was lacking in technique, and confesses himself unable to make out what a critic meant by alluding to a new tenor's "admirable portamento." He was on much more sure ground when he attacked Balfe for mangling Beethoven at the Grand National Concerts at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1850, when trivial rubbish was sandwiched between movements of the Eroica Symphony. A second visit, however, enabled him to withdraw his censure, as the Eroica and C minor Symphonies were performed without being cut in two. Punch had "no use for" Wagner, as we have seen, but he fully appreciated his romantic forerunner Weber; his salutation of Spohr and Hummel as classics was perhaps a trifle premature. The names of the various musical celebrities who figure in the pages of Punch in this period afford a striking illustration of the transitoriness of the fame of the executant. Who but experts in musical biography know of Sivori and Ole Bull now? Even the laurels of the great Thalberg, the most "gentlemanly" of all the great pianists, author of the most fashionable variations, have withered sadly in the last half century. Punch does not seem to have been specially impressed by Liszt, the greatest of them all, and misspells his name "Listz" on the occasion of a perfunctory reference to him in 1843. The favourite composers of waltzes were Strauss, the founder of the dynasty of the Viennese waltz-kings, and Labitzky. To the present generation the name Strauss has totally different associations; and we live so fast that an enlightened writer has recently declared that the once redoubtable Richard is also dead. It would be an overstatement to say that conductors were of no account in the 'forties and 'fifties, in view of the notoriety of Jullien and the prestige of Costa, who was both an autocrat and a martinet, but they did not loom nearly so large in the public eye as the great singers. The balance of repute has long since been decisively redressed and the popular conductor of to-day has no reason to complain of lack of homage, whether in the form of applause or official recognition.
Turner as Painter and Poet
The low opinion which Punch entertained of contemporary architects and sculptors and of their ability to design or execute a public building, a monument, or a memorial, has been noted in our brief survey of London. He made an exception in favour of Paxton, but does not seem to have recognized the genius of Alfred Stevens, and here at any rate was not in advance of public or expert opinion of the time. Stevens's design for the Wellington monument was only placed sixth in order of merit by the adjudicators of the competition in 1857, and though ultimately the execution of the monument was entrusted to him, it was not placed in the position intended for it till twenty-seven years after his death. As a judge of painting and painters Punch showed greater independence, intelligence and enlightenment. His earlier volumes abound in references to forgotten names, but he was at least no indiscriminate worshipper of established reputation. In a notice of the Suffolk Street Gallery in the autumn of 1841 he prints a most trenchant criticism of Maclise's "Sleeping Beauty" as showing "a disdain for both law and reason and avoiding an approximation to the vulgarity of flesh and blood in his representation of humanity." Landseer falls under his lash for his "courtier pictures" at the R.A. in 1844, and in the same article we find the first of many satirical references to Turner's poetic titles. Punch, we regret to say, wholly failed to recognize that a bad poet might be a very great painter. In his "Scamper through the Academy" we read:—
No. 77 is called Whalers, by J. M. W. Turner, R.A., and embodies one of those singular effects which are only met with in lobster salads, and in this artist's pictures. Whether he calls his pictures Whalers, or Venice, or Morning, or Noon, or Night, it is all the same; for it is quite as easy to fancy it one thing as another. We give here two subjects by this celebrated artist.
VENICE BY GASLIGHT GOING TO THE BALL
MS. "Fallacies of Hope"
(An Unpublished Poem).—Turner.