Atlantic Monthly | Page 7

being talked of as "a wit." He thought (with justice) that he had
something better in him than most wits, and he sacredly cherished high
aspirations. To him buffoonery was pollution. He attached to salt
something of the sacredness which it bears in the East. He was fuller of
repartee than any man in England, and yet was about the last man that
would have condescended to be what is called a "diner-out". It is a fact
which illustrates his mind, his character, and biography.
The "Q." papers, I say, were the first essays which attracted attention in
"Punch." In due time followed his "Punch's Letters to his Son," and

"Complete Letter-Writer," with the "Story of a Feather", mentioned
above. A basis of philosophical observation, tinged with tenderness,
and a dry, ironical humor,--all, like the Scottish lion in heraldry,
"within a double tressure-fleury and counter-fleury" of wit and
fancy,--such is a Jerroldian paper of the best class in "Punch." It stands
out by itself from all the others,--the sharp, critical knowingness,
sparkling with puns, of à Beckett,--the inimitable, wise, easy, playful,
worldly, social sketch of Thackeray. In imagery he had no rivals there;
for his mind had a very marked tendency to the ornamental and
illustrative,--even to the grotesque. In satire, again, he had fewer
competitors than in humor;--sarcasms lurk under his similes, like wasps
in fruit or flowers. I will just quote one specimen from a casual article
of his, because it happens to occur to my memory, and because it
illustrates his manner. The "Chronicle" had been attacking some artists
in whom he took an interest. In replying, he set out by telling how in
some vine countries they repress the too luxuriant growths by sending
in asses to crop the shoots. Then he remarked gravely, that young
artists required pruning, and added, "How thankful we ought all to be
that the 'Chronicle' keeps a donkey!" This is an average specimen of his
playful way of ridiculing. In sterner moods he was grander. Of a Jew
money-lender he said, that "he might die like Judas, but that he had no
bowels to gush out";--also, that "he would have sold our Saviour for
more money." An imaginative color distinguished his best satire, and it
had the deadly and wild glitter of war-rockets. This was the most
original quality, too, of his satire, and just the quality which is least
common in our present satirical literature. He had read the old
writers,--Browne, Donne, Fuller, and Cowley,--and was tinged with
that richer and quainter vein which so emphatically distinguishes them
from the prosaic wits of our day. His weapons reminded you of
Damascus rather than Birmingham,
A wit with a mission,--this was the position of Douglas in the last years
of his life. Accordingly he was a little ashamed of the immense success
of the "Caudle Lectures,"--the fame of which I remember being bruited
about the Mediterranean in 1845,--and which, as social drolleries, set
nations laughing. Douglas took their celebrity rather sulkily. He did not
like to be talked of as a funny man. However, they just hit the reading
English,--always domestic in their literary as in their other tastes,--and

so helped to establish "Punch" and to diffuse Jerrold's name. He began
now to be a Power in popular literature; and coming to be associated
with the liberal side of "Punch," especially, the Radicals throughout
Britain hailed him as a chief. Hence, in due course, his newspaper and
his magazine,--both of which might have been permanently successful
establishments, had Ids genius for business borne any proportion to his
genius for literature.
This, however, was by no manner of means the case. His nature was
altogether that of a literary man and artist. He could not speak in public.
He could not manage money matters. He could only write and
talk,--and these rather as a kind of _improvvisatore_, than as a steady,
reading, bookish man, like a Mackintosh or a Macaulay. His politics
partook of this character, and I always used to think that it was a queer
destiny which made him a Radical teacher. The Radical literature of
England is, with few exceptions, of a prosaic character. The most
famous school of radicalism is utilitarian and systematic. Douglas was,
emphatically, neither. He was impulsive, epigrammatic, sentimental.
He dashed gaily against an institution, like a picador at a bull. Ha never
sat down, like the regular workers of Ms party, to calculate the
expenses of monarchy or the extravagance of the civil list. He had no
notion of any sort of "economy." I don't know that he had ever taken up
political science seriously, or that he had any preference for one kind of
form of government over another. I repeat,--his radicalism was that of a
humorist. He despised big-wigs, and pomp of all