of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose love-poetry were
thus true, and whose _pudeur_ of personality thus simple and inviolate.
This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neither
love nor remember in public.




PENULTIMATE CARICATURE


There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of a
certain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century and
earlier. Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its notice the
vulgarising of the married woman. No one now would read Douglas Jerrold
for pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that humourist's serial,
_Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures_, which were presumably considered
good comic reading in the _Punch_ of that time, and to make acquaintance
with a certain ideal of the grotesque. Obviously to make a serious
comment on anything which others consider or have considered humorous is
to put one's-self at a disadvantage. He who sees the joke holds himself
somewhat the superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if he
thought it worth his eyesight. The last-named has to bear the least
tolerable of modern reproaches; but he need not always care. Now to turn
over Douglas Jerrold's monologues is to find that people in the
mid-century took their mirth principally from the life of the _arriere
boutique_. On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy of literature.
Therefore we must take something of the vulgarity of Jerrold as a
circumstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted. But the essential
vulgarity is that of the woman. There is in some old _Punch_ volume a