Mar. 17.
Tr is rather humiliating for the working journalist so called—the person who deals in reports verbatim and otherwise, company meetings, consolidation loans and other tales of mean streets—to have to confess that the best newspaper in the world is not really a newspaper at all in the accepted sense. Yet it is impossible to read Punch week by week without realizing that its pages are fuller of the sort of things that we want to know—especially we who live far afield,—than any other purveyer of popular information. Much in the same way one of the best books about the war was a humerous work. We all got tired very soon of strategical treatises based on official communiques, which as we have since learnt were about as truthful as a house agent's advertisement. Of descriptions of life in the trenches or fleet, Heaven forbid that the man who stayed at home should have had enough. Yet he could not help feeling a theatricalism and unreality, about many of them, which we believe the men who were in the trenches would cordially endorse. But A Diary of the Great War'"' by Samuel Pepys Junr. rang true through all its absurdities and satire. It was a faithful picture of the life of the average upper middle-class Londoner and what he thought about the war and its effect on him, which we recognized as real and living. And this delightful parody has become a historical document hardly if at all less valuable than its prototype.
So, too, of Mr. Punch. The most accurate and careful newspaper report can but give us one or two aspects of the particular incident described, limited by the time at which the characters concerned began and ceased to be interesting to the general public. But Punch can compress the history of a lifetime into a single picture. Take for instance, this drawing of the new sportsman,'' of most unprepossessing type, asking the stalker whether his knickerbockers will be 'a little too noticeable on the hill.""
To which the stalker answers "*Na, na, Sir. They're of sma' consequence. If the hind gets a glint of a man's face, shell no stay to look at his breeks.'' The joke is not particularly brilliant nor the drawing better than dozens that might be mentioned. But the effect of the whole is to tell us the life story of the two men appearing in it and a good deal, indirectly, of the state of society that produced them. Cartoons, of course, being essentially topical are necessarily historical and Punch has always been famous for his cartoons. The one in the number just quoted shows a German coal magnate looking at a picture of the desolation of Lens, while at his door stands a French sentry; and the inscription is Nemesis. Lens, 1915: Essen, 1928.'' Politics, which as everybody knows are highly controversial on the Ruhr question, do not seem to enter into this cartoon, which is rather a reflexion of what the average man is thinking, unchristian perhaps, but decidedly human. Glancing further over these pages we find that the peculiar brand of Cockney wit survives wars, unemployment and all the evils that flesh is heir to. On a ''fare'" alluding to the wintriness of the weather, cabby replies "'I give yer my, word Sir I ain't seen a butterfly all day."" The fact that the taxi is clearly being taken off the rank, where the driver - has perhaps been freezing for hours, adds to the poignancy of the remark. Acute observers might deduce from the fact that no fewer than four of the eighteen pictures deal with children, that family life is again becoming fashionable. But it may be due to the Christmas holiday atmosphere not yet having evaporated. Portsmouth
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.