contented their souls With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals--
was more than he could endure. Accordingly his representative conducted an imaginary interview with "The Director-General of the Empire," who had added some fresh lines in violent and obscure abuse of rowing-men, and who explained that he never played games himself, but "spent all his spare time loafing and scoring off masters"--a further hit at _Stalky_. This mood of resentment had entirely passed by 1907, when _Punch_ depicted Mr. Kipling as "A Verry Parfit Nobel Knight"--on the occasion of his being awarded the Nobel Prize--and in 1910 the perusal of _Rewards and Fairies_ is compared to reading English history by the light of a Will-o'-the-Wisp.
The reviewer notes defects in style and lucidity, but ends on a note of whole-hearted admiration:--
When one considers the quality of Mr. Kipling's invention, the piety of his patriotism, the freshness and vigour of his style, and his astounding understanding of men and movements, why, one forgets all about these little trifling defects and again murmurs, "Wizard."
To return to the early 'nineties, _Punch_ saw no virtue, artistic or otherwise, in the movement towards unrestrained self-expression in _belles lettres_ which had its outcome in the _Yellow Book_ and the _Savoy_, its headquarters at "The Bodley Head," and whose chief hierophants were the avowed disciples of Baudelaire and Verlaine. To _Punch_ the movement was wholly decadent. In the verses "Tell it not in Gath," in 1894, after denouncing "flowers of evil," and the practice of delving in the drains and dustbins of humanity, the writer declares he would far rather remain a Philistine than achieve enlightenment by such unsavoury means. In the same vein he addresses "Any Boy-poet of the Decadence":--
For your dull little vices we don't care a fig, It is _this_ that we deeply deplore: You were cast for a common or usual pig, But you play the invincible bore.
As in his earlier tirades against the Æsthetes, _Punch_ confounded all the contributors to the _Yellow Book_ and the _Savoy_ in one common anathema. The former, with an illustration by "Daubaway Weirdsley," and "Max" as "Max Mereboom," himself one of the finest literary parodists of our time, is held up in 1895 to especial ridicule. The _Savoy_ in 1896 becomes "The Saveloy," with imaginary extracts and further attacks on Max Mereboom, Simple Symons, and Weirdsley; while in the same year in "The Chaunt of the Bodley Head" (after Praed's _Chaunt of the Brazen Head_) the Savoy School is condemned for its mephitic atmosphere. There was in the movement much deliberate eccentricity, much of the cant of anti-cant, which clamoured for robust satire, but _Punch_ was more happily inspired in his ridicule of the popular and society novels of the time--in his parody of _Sherlock Holmes_, which was quite good enough for the original, and of Dodo, in which the rowdiness and pseudo-intellectuality of Mr. Benson's heroine are excellently hit off. It opens well with "'Sling me over a two-eyed steak, Bill,'" said Bobo." In the sequel the Marquis of Cokaleek, the noble unappreciated husband, gets killed in the hunting field, but Bobo does not marry Bill, her fancy man. She jilts him and "got herself married to an Austrian Prince at half an hour's notice by the A. of C." _Punch_, let it be recorded, was responsible for the often quoted saying which appeared in 1894 that "the modern novel is a blend of the Erotic, the Neurotic and the Tommyrotic."