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.
2. “MAX” IN DANGER
Mr. Beerbohm is in danger of being canonised. Critics may quarrel about him, but it is only because the wreaths get in the way of one another, and every critic thinks that his should be on top. They have even discovered that “Max” has a heart. “Max” may plead that it is only a little one, but that will not save him. Some other critic will discover that he has a message, and someone else will announce that he has a metaphysic. In order to avert this unseemly canonisation—or, at least, to keep it within the bounds of reason—one would like to adopt the ungracious part of advocatus diaboli and state the case against “Max” in the strongest possible terms. But, alas! one finds that there is nothing to say against him, except that he is not Shakespeare or Dr. Johnson.
One of the charms of Mr. Beerbohm is that he never pretends to be what he is not. He knows as well as anybody that he is not an oak of the forest, but a choice bloom grown from seed in a greenhouse, and even now lord of a pot rather than of a large garden. His art, at its best, is praise of art, not praise of life. Without the arts, the world would be meaningless to him. If he rewrote the plays of Shakespeare, he would make Hamlet a man who lacked the will to write the last chapter of a masterpiece, and Othello an author who murdered his wife because her books sold better than his, and King Lear a tedious old epic poet who perpetually recited his own verse till his daughters were able to endure it no longer and locked him out for the night. Cordelia, for her part, would be a sweet little creature, whose love for the old man was stronger than her literary sense, and who would slip out of a window and join him where he stamped up and down in the shrubbery, tripping over the bushes, cursing her more fastidious sisters, and booming out his bad verse to her and the rain. Mr. Beerbohm’s world is exclusively populated by authors, save for a few painters, sculptors, actors, musicians, and people who do not matter. One has to include the people who do not matter, because otherwise one’s generalisation would not be true.
Most people are agreed that Mr. Beerbohm’s recent work is his best. Consider his last three books, then, and how little of them could have come into existence, save in a world of authors. A Christmas Garland, his masterpiece, is a book of prose parodies on authors. Seven Men—yes, that, too, is his masterpiece—is a book in which every character that one remembers is an author or, at least, a liar. There were Enoch Soames with his poems, Ladbroke Brown with the BEAU-tiful play (as Swinburne would have said) on Savonarola, and the rival novelists of that adventurous week-end with the aristocracy. And in his last book, And Even Now, we find once more a variegated human comedy in which all the principal characters are authors and artists or their works, and other human beings are only allowed to walk on as supers. First of all we have “A Relic,” in which Mr. Beerbohm sees a pretty lady in a temper, and a short, fat man waddling after her, and determines to write a story about them. He does not write it, but he writes a story about the story he did not write. Then comes “How Shall I Word It?”—a joke about a “complete letter-writer” bought at a railway bookstall. This is followed by “Mobled King,” describing a statue to King Humbert, which, though erected, has never been unveiled because the priests and the fishermen object, and concluding with a wise suggestion that “there would be no disrespect, and there would be no violence, if the bad statues familiar to London were ceremoniously veiled, and their inscribed pedestals left just as they are.” Fourth comes “Kolniyatch”—a spoof account of the “very latest thing” in Continental authors. Few of us have read Kolniyatch in “the original Gibrisch,” but Mr. Beerbohm’s description of his work and personality makes it clear that he was an author compared with whom Dostoievsky and Strindberg were serene and saccharine:
Of the man himself—for on several occasions I had the privilege and the permit to visit him—I have the pleasantest, most sacred memories. His was a wonderfully vivid and intense personality. The head was beautiful, perfectly conic in form. The eyes were like two revolving lamps, set very close together. The smile was haunting. There was a touch of old-world courtesy in the repression of the evident impulse to spring at one’s throat.
After this comes “No. 2, The Pines”—yes, this is Mr. Beerbohm’s masterpiece, too. Everybody writes well about Swinburne, but Mr. Beerbohm writes better than anybody else—better, if possible, even than Mr. Lucas. What other writer could drive respect and mockery tandem with the same delicate skill? Mr. Beerbohm sees the famous Putney household not only with the comic sense, but through the eyes of a literary youth introduced for the first time into the presence of immortals. The Pines may be a Lewis-Carroll Wonderland, but it is still a wonderland, as he recalls that first meal at the end of the long table—“Watts-Dunton between us very low down over his plate, very cosy and hirsute, and rather like the Dormouse at that long tea-table which Alice found in Wonderland. I see myself sitting there wide-eyed, as Alice sat. And, had the Hare been a great poet, and the Hatter a great gentleman, and neither of them mad but each one only very odd and vivacious, I might see Swinburne as a glorified blend of those two.”
“A Letter that Was Not Written,” again, is a comedy of the arts, relating to the threatened destruction of the Adelphi. “Books within Books” is a charming speculation on books written by characters in fiction, not the least desirable of which, surely, was “Poments: Being Poems of the Mood and the Moment”—a work that made a character in a forgotten novel deservedly famous. The next essay, “The Golden Drugget,” may seem by its subject—the beam of light that falls from an open inn-door on a dark night—to be outside the literary-and-artistic formula, but is it not essentially an argument with artists that the old themes are best—that this “golden drugget” of light would somehow make a better picture than Smithkins’ Façade of the Waldorf Hotel by Night, in Peace Time? Similarly, “Hosts and Guests,” though it takes us perilously near the borderland of lay humanity, is essentially a literary causerie. Mr. Beerbohm may write on hosts and describe the pangs of an impoverished host in one of the “more distinguished restaurants” as he waits and wonders what the amount of the bill will be; but the principal hosts and hostesses of whom he writes are Jael and Circe and Macbeth and Old Wardle. “A Point to be Remembered by Very Eminent Men,” the essay that follows, contains advice to great authors as to how they should receive a worshipper who is to meet them for the first time. The author should not, Mr. Beerbohm thinks, be in the room to receive him, but should keep him waiting a little, though not so long as Leigh Hunt kept young Coventry Patmore, who had been kicking his heels for two hours when his host appeared “rubbing his hands and smiling ethereally, and saying, without a word of preface or notice of my having waited so long, ‘This is a beautiful world, Mr. Patmore!’”
There is no need to make the proof of the literary origins of “Max” more detailed. The world that he sees in the mirror of literature means more to Mr. Beerbohm than the world itself that is mirrored. The only human figure that attracts him greatly is the man who holds the mirror up. He does not look in his heart and write. He looks in the glass and writes. The parts of nature and art, as Landor gave them, will have to be reversed for Mr. Beerbohm’s epitaph. For him, indeed, nature seems hardly to exist. For him no birds sing, and he probably thinks that the scarlet pimpernel was invented by Baroness Orczy. His talent is urban and, in a good sense, prosaic. He has never ceased to be a dramatic critic, indeed, observing the men created by men (and the creators of those men) rather than the men created by God. He is a spectator, and a spectator inside four walls. He is, indeed, the last of the æsthetes. His æstheticism, however, is comic æstheticism. If he writes an unusual word, it is not to stir our imaginations with its beauty, but as a kind of dandyism, reminding us of the care with which he dresses his wit.
Within his own little world—so even the devil’s advocate would have to end by admitting—Mr. Beerbohm is a master. He has done a small thing perfectly, and one perfect quip will outlive ten bad epics. It is not to be wondered at that people already see the first hint of wings sprouting from his supremely well-tailored shoulders. He is, indeed, as immortal as anybody alive. He will flit through eternity, not as an archangel, perhaps, but as a mischievous cherub in a silk hat. He is cherub enough already always to be on the side of the angels. Those who declared that he had a heart were not mistaken. There is at least one note of tenderness in the peal of his mockery. There is a spirit of courtesy and considerateness in his writing, noticeable alike in “No. 2, The Pines,” and in the essay on servants. Thus, though he writes mainly on the arts and artists, he sees in them, not mere figures of ornament, but figures of life, and expresses through them clearly enough—I was going to say his attitude to life. He is no parasite at the table of the arts, indeed, but a guest with perfect manners, at once shy and brilliant, one who never echoes an opinion dully, but is always amusingly himself. That accounts for his charm. Perfect manners in literature are rare nowadays. Many authors are either pretending or condescending, either malicious or suspicious. “Max” has all the virtues of egotism without any of its vices.