Pastiche and prejudice

PASTICHE AND PREJUDICE
BY A. B. WALKLEY
NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF MCMXXI
Reprinted, by the courtesy of the Proprietors, from The Times.
Printed in Great Britain.

Writing of Lamennais, Renan says: “Il créa avec des réminiscences de la Bible et du langage ecclésiastique cette manière harmonieuse et grandiose qui réalise le phénomène unique dans l’histoire littéraire d’un pastiche de génie.” Renan was nothing if not fastidious, and “unique” is a hard word, for which I should like to substitute the milder “rare.” Pastiches “of genius” are rare because genius is rare in any kind, and more than ever rare in that kind wherein the writer deliberately forgoes his own natural, instinctive form of expression for an alien form. But even fairly plausible pastiches are rare, for the simple reason that though, with taste and application, and above all an anxious care for style, you may succeed in mimicking the literary form of another author or another age, it is impossible for you to reproduce their spirit—since no two human beings in this world are identical. Perhaps the easiest of all kinds is the theatrical “imitation,” because all that is to be imitated is voice, tone, gesture—an actor’s words not being his own—yet I have never seen one that got beyond parody. The sense of an audience is not fine enough to appreciate exact imitation; it demands exaggeration, caricature.

Parody, indeed, is the pitfall of all pastiche . Even Mr. Max Beerbohm, extraordinarily susceptible and responsive to style as he is, did not escape it in that delightful little book of his wherein, some years ago, he imitated many of our contemporary authors. I can think of but a single instance which faithfully reproduces not only the language but almost the spirit of the authors imitated—M. Marcel Proust’s volume of “Pastiches et Mélanges.” The only stricture one can pass on it, if stricture it be, is that M. Proust’s Balzac and St. Simon and the rest are a little “more Royalist than the King,” a little more like Balzac and St. Simon than the originals themselves; I mean, a little too intensely, too concentratedly, Balzac and St. Simon. But Marcel Proust is one of my prejudices. To say that his first two books, “Swann” and “Les Jeunes Filles,” have given me more exquisite pleasure than anything in modern French literature would not be enough—I should have to say, in all modern literature. Mrs. Wharton, I see from the “Letters,” sent Henry James a copy of “Swann” when it first came out (1918): I wish we could have had his views of it. It offers another kind of psychology from Henry James’s, and he would probably have said, as he was fond of saying, that it had more “saturation” than “form.” But I am wandering from my subject of pastiche .