Books and authors

by Robert Lynd

1. THE STUDENT OF PERFECTION

Mr. Max Beerbohm generally leaves us with the impression that he has written something perfect. He is, indeed, one of those writers to whom perfection is all-important, not only on account of their method, but on account of their subject matter. He is not a man engaged in a Laocoon struggle with his imagination—a man desperately at grips with a tremendous theme. He is more comparable to a laundress than to Laocoon. His work has the perfection of a starched shirt-front, which if it is not perfect is nothing. Mr. Beerbohm takes what may be called an evening-dress view of life. One would not be surprised to learn that he writes in evening dress. He has that air of good conversation without intimacy, of deliberate charm, of cool and friendly brilliance that always shows at its best above a shining and expressionless shirt-front. He belongs to the world in which it is good form to forget the passions, except for their funny side, and in which the persiflage is more indispensable than the port. Not much good literature has been written in this spirit in England. The masterpieces of persiflage in English literature are, in verse, The Rape of the Lock and, in prose, The Importance of Being Earnest. Can anybody name three other masterpieces in the same kind? Everyone who reads Seven Men can name one. It is called Seven Men.

Mr. Beerbohm is, in the opinion of some good critics, best of all as a parodist. His Christmas Garland contains the finest prose parodies in the language. And, even outside his confessed parodies, he remains a parodist in the greater part of his work. In Seven Men he is both a parodist of Henry James and a caricaturist of men of letters. Henry James loved to take a man of letters as his hero: Mr. Beerbohm loves to take a man of letters as a figure of fun. His men of letters have none of that dignity with which they are invested in “The Death of a Lion.” They are simply people to tell amusing stories about, as monarchs and statesmen become at a dinner-table. This does not mean that Mr. Beerbohm is not a devoted disciple of literature. There is a novelist, Maltby, in one of his stories, who lives in the suburbs and writes a successful novel about aristocratic life, and afterwards writes an unsuccessful novel about suburban life. “I suppose,” he says, explaining his failure, “one can’t really understand what one doesn’t love, and one can’t make good fun without real understanding.” We may reasonably take this as Mr. Beerbohm’s own apologia. He has a sincere tenderness for this world he derides. In A Christmas Garland he protests his admiration for the victims of his parodies. And as we read Seven Men we feel sure that it is his extreme devotion to the world of letters that leads him to choose it as the theme of his mockery. When he writes of men of letters—especially of the exquisitely minor men of letters—he is like a man speaking his own language in his own country. When he wanders outside the world of authors he writes under a sense of limitations, like a man venturing into a foreign tongue. In Seven Men the least remarkable of the five stories—though it, too, would seem remarkable in any less brilliant company—is “James Pethel,” the story of a financier, who lives for the sake of risks and who is happiest when he is risking not only himself but those he loves—his daughter, for instance, or a favourite author. The description of a motor drive, on which he takes his wife and daughter and Mr. Beerbohm in Normandy, with its many hair-breadth escapes, is an excellent piece of comico-sensational literature. But the story reads like hearsay, not like reminiscences of a man’s own world. One does not believe that Pethel ever existed, or that he enjoyed drinking water in France simply because there was a risk of typhoid. Even the motor drive is not quite “convincing.” Or, perhaps, one should say that, while the motor drive itself is immensely convincing, James Pethel’s state of mind as he drives the car is not. Henry James might have made of him a queer study in morbid psychology. Mr. Beerbohm has hardly raised him above the level of a joke. It lacks the thrill of masterly and intimate portraiture. “A. V. Laider” is another story with a non-literary theme. It is, perhaps, the most refined example of leg-pulling in fiction. It is one of those stories in which the reader is worked up to a moment of intense horror only to be let down with mockery by the narrator. Everything in it is perfectly done—the grey introduction at the rainy seaside, the railway accident foreseen in the palms of several of the passengers, and the final confession and comment. If not a man of letters, A. V. Laider is at least a man of imagination, and Mr. Beerbohm knows the type.

As to which of Mr. Beerbohm’s burlesque portraits of authors is the best, opinions quite properly differ. The votes that “Savonarola” Brown loses for the burlesque of his personality he wins back again for the burlesque of his play. Brown was a dramatist who chose his subject on a novel principle. He originally thought of writing a tragedy about Sardanapalus, but on looking this up in the Encyclopædia his eye fell on “Savonarola,” and what he read interested him. He did not allow himself to be hampered, however, by historical facts, but adopted the policy of allowing his characters to live their own lives. In the result his blank-verse tragedy introduces us to most of the famous and infamous figures in Italian history. Had Brown lived to finish the fifth act, there is no doubt that he would have introduced Garibaldi—perhaps even D’Annunzio—into his coruscating pageant. He has certainly achieved the most distinguished list of dramatis personæ ever crowded into a brief play. The play as we now possess it can hardly be described as a parody. At least, it is not a parody on any particular play. It makes fun at the expense not only of the worst writer of blank verse now living, but of Shakespeare himself. It is like one of those burlesque operas that were popular thirty years ago, and some of the speeches might have been stolen from Julius Cæsar Up-to-Date. The opening scene introduces us not only to a Friar and a Sacristan (wigged by Clarkson), but to Savonarola, Dante, Lucrezia Borgia, Leonardo da Vinci, and St. Francis of Assisi. Savonarola, on seeing Lucrezia, cries, “Who is this wanton?” St. Francis, with characteristic gentleness, reproves him:

Hush, Sir! ’tis my little sister

The poisoner, right well-beloved by all

Whom she as yet hath spared.

The central interest of the play is the swaying intensity of the love of the poisoner and Savonarola. In his passion Savonarola at one moment discards the monkish frock for the costume of a Renaissance nobleman. But the sight of his legs temporarily kills Lucrezia’s feeling for him. She scornfully bids him:

Go pad thy calves!

Thus mightst thou just conceivably with luck

Capture the fancy of some serving-wench.

This being too much for him, they part in the mood of revenge, and, after Lucrezia has made a desperate effort to force a poisoned ring on him, they both find themselves in gaol. When the curtain rises on Savonarola’s cell, he has been in prison three hours. “Imprisonment,” says the stage direction, “has left its mark on both of them. Savonarola’s hair has turned white. His whole aspect is that of a very old, old man. Lucrezia looks no older than before, but has gone mad.” How like nine-tenths of the prison scenes one has seen on the stage! But never on the stage has one heard a prison soliloquy half so fine as Savonarola’s, from its opening sentence:

Alas, how long ago this morning seems

This evening!—

down to its close:

What would my sire have said,

And what my dam, had anybody told them

The time would come when I should occupy

A felon’s cell? O the disgrace of it!—

The scandal, the incredible come-down!

It masters me. I see i’ my mind’s eye

The public prints—“Sharp Sentence on a Monk!”

What then? I thought I was of sterner stuff

Than is affrighted by what people think.

Yet thought I so because ’twas thought of me;

And so ’twas thought of me because I had

A hawk-like profile and a baleful eye.

Lo! my soul’s chin recedes, soft to the touch

As half-churn’d butter. Seeming hawk is dove,

And dove’s a gaolbird now. Fie, out upon ’t!

I do not think that anyone has produced a more unforgettable line of heroic decasyllabic verse than:

The scandal, the incredible come-down!

Savonarola’s fame will be increased as a result of that exquisitely inappropriate line. It is infinitely regrettable that Brown did not live to write the fifth act of his masterpiece. Mr. Beerbohm has attempted a scenario for a fifth act, and it contains many admirable things. But Mr. Beerbohm lacks Brown’s “magnifical” touch, though he does his best to imitate it in the lines in which he makes Lucrezia say that she means:

To start afresh in that uncharted land

Which austers not from out the antipod,

Australia!

Good as this is, it seems just to verge on parody. It is grotesque where Brown would have been moving. The play as a whole, however, will find a place among the minor classics. It is far, far better than going to the pantomime. It is as good as the pantomime ought to be.

“Maltby and Braxton” is something new in literature—a comic ghost story. There are plenty of funny stories about ghosts that did not exist. This is a funny story about a ghost that did exist. It is a story of the jealousy of two novelists of the ’nineties, and tells how one of them was pursued by the ghost of his jealous rival to a week-end at a duchess’s. It is a nightmare seen objectively—everybody’s nightmare.

In “Enoch Soames”—which is the masterpiece of the book—Mr. Beerbohm fools, but he fools wisely. He never takes his eye off human nature. He draws not only a caricature, but a man. The minor poet—the utterly incompetent minor poet—has never before been drawn so brilliantly and with so much intelligence as in “Enoch Soames.” The pretentiousness, the inclination to disparage, the egotism, the affected habits and beliefs—bad poets (and some less bad ones) have had them in all ages, but the type has not before been collected and pinned in a glass case. “Enoch Soames” is a perfect fable for egotists. It might be described as a sympathetic exposure. One feels almost sorry for Soames as Mr. Beerbohm subjects him to the terrible justice of the comic imagination. “Enoch Soames” is a moral tale into which the Devil himself enters as a character. Mr. Beerbohm made his reputation as an eccentric writer. In this story he suggests an attitude the reverse of eccentric. Perhaps it is that middle-age has descended on him. He has certainly added wisdom to playfulness, and in the result has painted an imaginary portrait which is as impressively serious as it is brilliantly entertaining.