'Less Subject to Being Overawed by Solemn Humbug'

“[I]f you read Mr. Beerbohm at his best you receive a certain stimulation and, if you follow him, you will be lead up to a point of view, which will enable you subsequently to be less subject to being overawed by solemn humbug.”

That’s as succinct a description of Max Beerbohm’s charm as I have encountered, though the source is somewhat unlikely. Ford Madox Ford was a deft writer of prose and a shrewd critic, but one wouldn’t expect the arch-Modernist to praise the arch-late-Victorian ironist, who was Ford’s senior by only sixteen months. Ford nominally reviews Beerbohm’s Seven Men and W.H. Hudson’s Birds in Town and Village in the November 6, 1919 issue of the Piccadilly Review (collected in Critical Essays, Carcanet, 2002). I say “nominally” because the review, titled “The Serious Books,” tells us almost nothing about the books in question. The “lede,” as the boys in the press room like to say, is buried. In the review’s four pages, Beerbohm is mentioned by name three times, and Seven Men not at all. Hudson gets the same treatment. Ford, I suspect, perhaps in homage to Beerbohm, is spoofing the form.    

Ford starts with and never quite recovers from a lengthy digression about his late friend Arthur Marwood who, in a few years, would serve as a model for Christopher Tietjens in the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924-28). Marwood maintained, he tells us, “that for any proper man there could only be four books in the English language that could be worth reading.” This is the sort of outrage I would lay down as a drunken undergraduate, just to watch the ears steam, though secretly I sort of believed what I was saying. “Two of these four he was dogmatic about”: Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion and Ancient Law by Sir Henry James Sumner Maine. Now Ford gets to the theme expressed in his title:

“Gentlemen with no literary gifts, with no love of literature, and with no literary insight – though this tendency is mostly Teutonic – produce lives of Keats, Shelley, Browning, Crabbe, George Darley, Donne, in the hope of obtaining the fame that descends upon the erudite, of the rewards that are reserved for the persistently dull. These are the most pernicious of all writers of serious books – but there are an enormous number of others.”

Ford is just warming up. He’s already at the halfway point, and still no mention of Beerbohm or Hudson. Here’s the “nut graf,” to revert again to journalistic lingo:

“As written today, then, the Serious Book is generally Teutonic in its origin – that is to say, it is produced by gentlemen more distinguished for their industry than for their gifts, insight, or love of their subjects. That a serious book should possess form, imaginative insight, or interest for anyone not a specialist, would, generally speaking, be considered a very unsound proposition. To say that its writing should be distinguished by the quality of style, would be universally condemned.”

As to Beerbohm, Ford calls him “the last survivor of the English school of essayists,” which was certainly true as of 1919. To read Beerbohm is, he says, “to acquire little or no factual instruction,” and that, of course, is one of the reasons we read him.