LONDON TO ERECT MONUMENT TO “PUNCH”

Hokitika Guardian, 13 March 1920, Page 4

LONDON TO ERECT MONUMENT TO “PUNCH”

TO IMMORTALIZE JOURNAL’S WORK IN WAR.

(New York Herald). The most surprising war memorial yet proposed is one with regard tc which Mr Rudyard Kipling is a leading figure. It has been decided to set up in London a statue of “Punch” in order to celebrate the part taken by that periodical in the late unpleasantness with the Germans.

The very distinguished committee which has the matter in hand is representative of all sides of art and literature in Great Britain and Ireland, including everybody from Lord Morley to the Prince of Wales. This will be the first time that a periodical has been honored in such a fashion. But it is not likely that the most cynical American will deny that the tribute was well earned. All through the four and a half years of horror Punch was cheerful and confident. While other journals half believed that the submarine and the other devices of Ivultur would do up the Allies, this weekly, published half in fun and altogether in earnest, never had the slightest doubt as to the outcome.

ANDREW D. WHITE ON PUNCH. Once upon a time a man went up to Ithaca to see Dr Andrew D. White on a matter of foreign news: The distinguished diplomatist and first president of Cornell took the visitor over to the library of the university and showed him a lot of hooks —mostly historical —which he had given to the institution. On the way back to ‘ his house the President Emeritus remarked casually that he had one history w'hieh he would never part with in his lifetime. It was a bound set of Punch from the beginning. “That set of volumes,” said Dr White, “is the best record of a nation and its capital that I know of. Everything is there, from politics to fashion and from sport to art. It is our custom to laugh at some phases of British humor, but Emerson was quite right when lie said that it was impossible to take up a number of Punch without finding at least one good thing in it. At any rate, that is my experience, and I see every copy.” THE PROOF OF SUCCESS. “To get into Punch” is the best proof that a British, an American ,or a French statesman has “arrived.” In the dark hours of the civil war the North hated the way in which Punch held up Lincoln to derision. But the manner in which it woke up and paid tribute to the dead President, made the people of the Union side forget and forgive the bad taste and the bad judgment of earlier days.

His old enemies and present friends the French used to say of the Englishman tl«at he was so stupid that he never knew when he was licked. Americans have said of him that he could not see a joke, even when it was written in words of one syllable. The Irish question has been described as the effort of a dull nation to govern a very clever one. But if Punch were to be taken as a test, it is not likely that many intelligent persons would agree that the English were unintelligent. SHOWS AMERICANS TO EUROPE.

A publication which is a complete expression, as Dr Andrew D. White put it, of the traditions, prejudices, manners and everything else of the British nation is not to be sneezed at. Punch was always capable of expressing Mr Gladstone in his most unctuous moments, or Disraeli in his most Oriental magnificence, and its artists always have been the first to reveal : dequately to London the personal peculiarities of America’s potentates, though how they did it, nobody knows. The best English joke ever made was “Punch’s advice to persons about to get married —Don’t!” The best Irish joke was Charles Keene’s drawing of the group of tenants waiting to shoot their landlord. He was late and one gentleman with a gun remarked, “Shure I hope that nothin’ has happened to the poor ould gentleman!” Punch is never partisan. It is ah ways more or less inclined to support the government in power. But it always puts patriotism before party. It was once said by James Huneker, of Mouquin’s, that it was not a restaurant but a habit. In the same way it could be said of Punch that it is really not a journal but a looking glass for that strange nation which muddles along from one success to another.

Punch is more characteristic of Great Britain than the once German royal family, the Royal Academy, the Welsh Prime Minister, the Scottish Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Edward Carson, the Ulster leader from Dublin; Professor De Valera, the Sinn Fein “President” from Spain or Manica. NOTHING IMPROVING.

The Punch monument will represent nothing improving or instructive, and in that respect it ought to be a lesson to Americans in general and New Yorkers in particular. Of course New York will build a war memorial. It isn’t likely that the second city of the world—or is it the first?—is j*oing to allow the bodies of her sons—left in France by the advice of Theodore Roosevelt and General Pershing—to be without some votive monument within the limits of the seven boroughs. It is not reasonable, however, to imagine that the mothers, sisters or orphans of the men who put America’s name on the map this time will grow wildly excited over some of the suggestions that are being made. The Victory Arch, at Twenty-fifth street and Fifth avenue, is a real war memorial. Tt is the same class as the Washington Monument, the Nelson Column in London and the Arc de l’Etoilc in the. Champs Elysees in Paris. The important thing is to remember that what is desirable is not something useful or improving, but something that will appeal to the imagination and the emotions, lilije the Tomb of Napoleon or the British Lion on the field of Waterloo.

What earthly reason is' there why Americans should perpetrate, as is suggested, the memory of their illustrious dead by erecting a building in which garrulous individuals . of both | sexes—most of them Bolshevistic in their beliefs—should discuss ways and means for making perfectly incompatible persons love one another? There is enough foolish chatter in the “forum” of a church in Fifth avenue every Sunday night in the season without

New York going to the trouble of starting a “town meeting” of its own. As far as the war is concerned, there is no reason why the people of this city should not he as sentimental as they want to be. The important thing is to make a monument, not something useful or educational. A list of the battles in which General Pershing’s Americans were engaged ought to be much more interesting to native bora or loyal adopted sons than a syllabus of discussions on the League of Nations or any of the other subjects that are now interesting the saviours of society.

The Canadians got ahead of the United States when they started their war memorials two years ago, at a time when a lot of nervous persons in this country were holding up thenhands in holy horror at the driving power of the Germans. Anybody who predicted at that time that decency was going to win was simply regarded as a silly optimist, and was despised and derided in consequence. But that is ail old story.