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.
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.
II
MR. ARNOLD BENNETT CONFESSES
Mr. Bennett is at once a connoisseur and a card. He not only knows
things but has an air of knowing things. He lets you know that he is
“in the know.” He has a taking way of giving information as though
it were inside information. He is the man of genius as tipster. In
_Things That Have Interested Me_ he gives us tips about painting,
music, literature, acting, war, politics, manners and morals. He never
hesitates: even when he is hinting about the future, he seems to do it
with a nod that implies, “You may take my word for it.” There was never
a less speculative author. Mr. Wells precipitates himself into eternity
or the twenty-first century in search of things that really matter. Mr.
Bennett is equally inquisitive, but he is inquisitive in a different
way and almost entirely about his own time. Where Mr. Wells speculates,
Mr. Bennett finds out, and, “when found, makes a note.” He gives one
the impression of a man with a passion for buttonholing experts. He
could interest himself for a time in any expert--an expert footballer
or an expert Civil Servant or an expert violinist or an expert
washerwoman. He likes to see the wheels of contemporary life--even the
smallest wheel--at work, and to learn the secrets of the machine. His
attitude to life is suggested by the fact that he has written a book
called _The Human Machine_, and that it is inconceivable that he should
write a book called _The Human Soul_. This is not to deny Mr. Bennett’s
vivid imaginative interest in things. It is merely to point out that it
is the interest not of a mystic but of a contemporary note-taker. That
is the circle within which his genius works, and it is a genius without
a rival of its kind in the literature of our time. He pursues his facts
with something of the appetite of a Boswell, though more temperately.
He has common sense where Boswell was a fool, however. Mr. Bennett,
finding that even a glass of champagne and, perhaps, a spoonful of
brandy taken regularly had the effect of clogging his “own particular
machine,” decided to drink no alcohol at all. Boswell might have taken
the same decision, but he could not have kept to it. Mr. Bennett, none
the less, is as fantastic in his common sense as was Boswell in his
folly. Each of them is a fantastic buttonholer. It is this element in
him that raises Mr. Bennett so high above all the other more or less
realistic writers of his time.
_Things That Have Interested Me_ is a book of confessions that could
have been written by no other living man. His style--perky, efficient,
decisive--is the echo of a personality. What other critic of the arts
would express his enthusiasm for great painting just like this?
It was fortunate for Turner that Girtin died early. He might have
knocked spots off Turner. And, while I am about the matter, I may
as well say that I doubt whether Turner was well advised in having
his big oil-paintings hung alongside of Claude’s in the National
Gallery. The ordeal was the least in the world too severe for them.
Still, I would not deny that Turner was a very great person.
Such a paragraph, with its rapid series of terse judgments, is
defiantly interesting. It is not only the “You may take it from me”
attitude that fascinates us: it is the “me” from whom you may take it.
It is an excited “me” as well as a cocksure “me.” Mr. Bennett is an
enthusiast, as you may see when, writing of Brabazon, he affirms:
In my opinion his “Taj Mahal” is the finest water-colour _sketch_
ever done. He probably did it in about a quarter of an hour.
Or, turning to literature, he will tell you: