BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
SEVEN MEN. By Max Beerbohm. Heinemann. 7s. net.
It is a common ground of complaint against Mr. Max Beerbohm that he publishes too little. But the very fastidiousness which makes him, compared with the word-fountains of our time, so notable an example of limitation of output is what makes the work he does print so surpassingly good. Economy is a word freely used and much abused. It is sometimes applied to writers whose only claim to it is that they use short sentences or that they omit everything except inessentials. But Mr. Beerbohm deserves more than any artist of our time the epithet "economical." Always, and increasingly so with the passage of time, he has taken pains to print no sentence and no word that does not help his effect; and the five stories in this book, even were their other merits less than they are, might serve as models of simple and exact expression, the cunning accumulation of telling detail, the complete avoidance of detail which does not tell.
Of the five stories one, James Pethel, is a study of the gambling temperament localised in an attractive but terrifying man, and one, A. V. Laider, is an astonishingly clever fantasia on the theme of lying. The other, and more ambitious, three are studies, we might almost call them historical studies, of literature, literary men, and "the literary life." They all relate to that remote period, now faded and therefore a little charming, "the nineties"; they give us types of writers, second or third or tenth rate, whose reputations die, but who are interesting enough to be celebrated as types, if not as individuals. Savonarola Brown—the obscure man who spent his life on an unfinished tragedy on the best blank-verse models—is the most slightly sketched of them; but here what the portrait lacks—perhaps that shadowy figure offered no more lines for the pencil to seize—is more than made up for by the best parody that even Mr. Beerbohm has written. Remove the burlesque, the comic stage directions, the juxtapositions of Lucrezia Borgia, St. Francis, Andrea del Sarto and Pippa (who "passes" in her own inimitable way), and the more extravagant convolutions of the plot, and you will see that Mr. Beerbohm could quite easily have manufactured a play better than most modern poetic dramas, and written in verse at once so fluent and so reminiscent of the best masters as to command the respect of the reviewers, and possibly a production (for a few nights) by some manager ambitious to show that he desired to reunite Literature and the Stage. At times we forget that we are reading a burlesque:
Pope. Of this anon.
[Stands over body of Gaoler.]
Our present business
Is general woe. No nobler corse hath ever
Impressed the ground. O let the trumpets speak it!
[Flourish of trumpets.]
This was the noblest of the Florentines.
His character was flawless, and the world
Held not his parallel. O bear him hence
With all such honours as our State can offer.
He shall interred be with noise of cannon,
As doth befit so militant a nature.
Prepare these obsequies.
[Papal Officers lift body of Gaoler.]
Did Mr. Beerbohm write this? Or was it Brown, fresh from The Duchess of Malfi or The Broken Heart?
The two stories that remain are more elaborate. In Enoch Soames we are given the picture of the kind of sepulchral, costive, dedicated, fame-gluttonous minor poet who has haunted the by-ways of literature in all ages; we are given, as well, a realistic picture of what those by-ways were twenty years ago, and a plot (which races between the future and the past) the intricacies of which are followed with equal ingenuity and imperturbability. But there can be little dispute that Maltby and Braxton is the great achievement of the volume. These two were rivals who had a brief vogue in the nineties; the very scent of the time comes back with the titles of their masterpieces, Ariel in Mayfair and A Faun in the Cotswolds. Maltby in a weak moment cheated Braxton out of a week-end at the Duchess of Hertfordshire's, and when the hapless Maltby got to Keeb Hall Braxton's ghost haunted him, driving him into perpetual solecisms and misadventures. There is the background: the gossiping coteries of London, the fleeting fashions of literature, the first vogue of the bicycle, the dabbling great dames, the house-parties, soirées, dinners, church-goings. And in front of it the most comic of tragedies, the most tragic of comedies is played. The story is written with such skill that the cruelty is never quite cruel, the laughter never quite flippant, the extravagances always anchored to reality: at the end, in spite not only of the caricature but of the "tallest" fiction about a ghost that we remember, we feel that we have been reading a plain statement of fact. And this is what, at bottom, the story is: it is more realistic than any naturalist novel: it is the work of one who, for all his fantastic invention and wit, has a prodigiously keen pair of eyes and a profound understanding of human nature. We hope, by the way, that Mr. Beerbohm's passage about literary fauns will finally expel these overworked creatures from our midst.
DONNE'S SERMONS: SELECTED PASSAGES WITH AN ESSAY. By Logan Pearsall Smith. Milford. 6s. net.
Donne's reputation as a poet, very high for some time after his death, sank almost to nothingness for two centuries. In the last thirty years he has, by virtue partly of his occasional splendours of passion, imagery, and even music, partly of a modernity in him which is attuned to the spirit of our own time, regained his old position. Much has been written of him; Mr. Gosse has written his Life in two volumes, Professor Grierson has edited him in one of the most exhaustive and scholarly of the Oxford editions of poets; he has exercised a traceable influence on men now writing. But the revival has been confined to his poems. His prose, contained in three huge folios and several small pamphlets, has remained unread; and it is significant that until a few years ago he who wished to possess (for none thought of perusing) the Dean's sermons was likelier to find them at a theological bookseller's than in one of those shops which cater for the collector of fine literature. The neglect was doubly explicable. Not only were Donne's Sermons sermons, and therefore liable to fall into the disregard into which the sermons of South and Tillotson, and even those of Jeremy Taylor, have fallen, but they were sermons so voluminous as to be terrifying to the most insatiable reader, and (for the most part) so involved, so stuffed with scholasticism, theological hair-splitting, debate about texts and about commentaries on texts, that a first attempt at perusal might have made the bravest quail. But the few who have dared the darkness of the great mine have never been disappointed; all over it, sparkling magnificently to the explorer's touch, are great jewels of imagination cut with the craft of a master of language.
Mr. Pearsall Smith, performing for his readers the labour they would have shirked, has gone through the whole of Donne's Sermons and extracted a hundred-and-fifty passages, short and long, illustrating his character and his genius. Not quite the whole of the ground is covered; the editor has chosen nothing of which the principal claim to distinction was that it conveyed, with great justice or great force, a doctrine of the Church or an edifying lesson. He has made his anthology as a poet and a student of character would make it; and the result is a volume of passages which exhibit that strange vehement man of genius more clearly than could any biography, and which substantiates his claim to be considered as being, at his best, a writer of English prose that has never been surpassed for music and richness. His greatest passages—and this holds good of all English prose—are those in which he is contemplating large elemental things. A roll like the roll of the prophetic books comes into his voice when he speaks of the majesty of God, the powers of Death and of Evil, the passage of time, the justice that waits for sin, and the decay that will overtake beauty; when he stands in the attitudes and assumes the voice of adoration, of accusation, or of grief. But even in his dialectics the restless intellectual in him was continually striking out sparks of wit; the insatiable observer in him was noting small things, sticks, straws, and insects, puddles and ponds; the insuppressible poet pouring out images copious enough to furnish out a hundred minor men. This is a long-needed book, done with competence and exquisite taste. His greatest, loveliest things are as good as Sir Thomas Browne's; his grandest are grander than Jeremy Taylor's. There is probably no sentence in our language so long as that in which he depicted Eternal Damnation, yet it swells and swells, never breaking its back, always borne up by the mighty mind of his spirit. Hell is deprivation of God. "That God," begins this great passage,