Re: The Pages of Punch
1938: The Classically Educated Master Criminal
Most Latin tags encapsulate quite complex ideas into very few words. The English language rarely supports such economy. So I prefer the following longer, freer translation:
The object must be pursued without compromise but if it can be achieved without unpleasantness then so much the better.
The master criminal is addressing this message – in Latin – to a dodgy set of shady characters, including the obligatory gangster’s moll. We clearly aren’t expected to believe that any of them will understand what he is saying nor that they would appreciate the instruction even if they understood it. Looking at the gang it is highly likely that there will indeed be some unpleasantness. We are expected to find it amusing that the arch criminal is so literate. Possibly he is meant to have attended a Public School in his youth and then ‘gone to the bad’. (Jane Austen once described Winchester College as a place for future heroes, legislators, fools and villains.)
Presumably the cartoonist assumed that a reasonable proportion of Punch’s readers would have understood the quotation. Even those that didn’t would at least get part of the joke.
Interestingly this quotation does not stem from classical antiquity at all. It comes from the writings of a Superior General of the Jesuits and dates from the late Sixteenth Century.