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_.
I was present one afternoon at a curious experiment in theatrical
_pastiche_. This was a rehearsal _of_ a rehearsal of the screen scene
from _The School for Scandal_, which was supposed to be directed by
Sheridan himself. Rather a complicated affair, because Miss Lilian
Braithwaite was supposed to be playing not Lady Teazle but Mrs. Abington
playing Lady Teazle, Mr. Gilbert Hare had to play Mr. Parsons playing
Sir Peter, and so forth—histrionics, so to speak, raised to the second
power. To tell the truth, I think the middle term tended to fall out.
It was easy enough for the players to make themselves up after the
originals in the Garrick Club picture of the screen scene, but how these
originals spoke or what their personal peculiarities were, on or off
the stage, who shall now say? There you have the difference between
fact and fiction. Lady Teazle and Sir Peter, having no existence save
in the book of the play, are producible from it at any time, as “real”
as they ever were, but Mrs. Abington and Mr. Parsons are not fixed in
a book, and their reality died with them. Naturally enough the actual
scene written by Sheridan “went” with very much greater force than the
setting of conversations, interruptions, etc., in which it was embedded,
for the simple reason that the one part had had the luck to be imagined
by Sheridan and the other had not. But as a _pastiche_ this new part,
written round the old, seemed to me on the whole very well done; there
was hardly a word that Sheridan and his friends _might_ not have said.
Just one, however, there noticeably was. Mr. Gerald du Maurier (as
Sheridan) was made to tell Mr. Leon Quartermaine (as Charles) that, in
his laughter at the discovery of Lady Teazle, he was not to expect the
“sympathy of the audience.” _That_, I feel sure, was an anachronism, a
bit of quite modern theatrical lingo. I should guess that it came to us
from the French, who are fond of talking of a _rôle sympathique_. Mr.
du Maurier, if any one, must remember his father’s delightful sketch
of English people shopping in Normandy, when the artful shopwoman is
cajoling a foolish-faced Englishman with “le visage de monsieur m’est
si sympathique.” The Italian _simpatico_ is, of course, even more
hard-worked. I felt sure, then, as I say, about the anachronism; but
I am quite aware that it is never safe to trust to one’s instinct
in these matters. It is by no means impossible that some one may
triumphantly produce against me a newspaper or book of 1775 which speaks
of “the sympathy of the audience.” The unexpected in these cases does
occasionally happen.
And certainly any one who has tried his hand at a _pastiche_ of a
dead and gone author will have frequently been astonished, not at
the antiquity but at the modernity of the style. Language changes
less rapidly than we are apt to suppose. The bad writers seem to get
old-fashioned earliest—because, I suppose, they yield most easily to
ephemeral tricks of speech. For example, Fanny Burney, who, I cannot but
think, wrote a bad style, and in her later books (as Macaulay pointed
out) a kind of debased Johnsonese, is now decidedly old-fashioned. But
Jane Austen, whose style, though scarcely brilliant, was never bad, is
not. A modern Mr. Collins would not talk of “elegant females”—but even
then he was put forward as ridiculous for doing so. Jane was fond of
“the chief of the day” and “the harp was bringing.” These phrases are
_passées_, but I doubt if you will find many others.
Our sense of the past, in fact, may illude us. And that reminds me of
Henry James’s solitary _pastiche_, his posthumous (and fragmentary)
“Sense of the Past.” The “past” he deals with is, roughly, the Jane
Austen period, and I think his language would very much have astonished
Jane Austen. For one thing, they didn’t colloquially emphasize in her day
as Henry James makes them do. I take a page at random:—“He mustn’t be
_too_ terribly clever for us, certainly! We enjoy immensely your being
so extraordinary; but I’m sure you’ll take it in good part if I remind
you that there _is_ a limit.” Is this our ultra-modern Mrs. Brookenham
speaking? No, it is Mrs. Midmore, somewhere about 1820. To be more
exact, it is Henry James speaking with the emphasis that always abounded
in his novels and his letters and his talk. Again: “I can’t keep off
that strangeness of my momentary lapse.” That doesn’t sound to my ear
a bit like 1820. Again: “It must have been one of your pale passions,
as you call ’em, truly—so that even if her ghost does hover I shan’t be
afraid of so very thin a shade.” Note the “’em,” the author’s timid
little speck of antique colour, but note also how the speaker carries
on the “ghost” figure—in a way that is signed “Henry James, 19—” all
over. The fact is, Henry James, with his marked, individual, curiously
“modern” style, was the last man to express himself in an alien style,
particularly the more simple style of an earlier age. To write a pure
_pastiche_ you must begin by surrendering, putting clean away your own
personality—how otherwise are you to take on another’s?
I have no illusions about the essays in _pastiche_ to be found in the
earlier of the following papers. If they do not always fall below parody,
they never rise above it. Occasional fragments of authentic text will be
recognized at a glance. “These Things are but Toyes.”