'A Contentment with Things as They Are'

“A world without irony would have to be either an earthly paradise, where it could never arise for there would be nothing to provoke it, or else an earthly hell, where it was never allowed to show its face. Our world seems unlikely ever to become an earthly paradise.”

D.J. Enright (1920-2002) had little taste for politics, perhaps because his gift for the nuanced deployment of irony inoculated him against infection. In the passage above, drawn from The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony (Oxford University Press, 1986), he implicitly dismisses the utopian impulse. One can’t imagine him campaigning for the cause du jour, which may be the reason he is nearly forgotten by people who ought to know better. The world, Enright suggests, doesn’t need our help.

The writer who most often came to mind while I was reading The Alluring Problem was not Swift (whom Enright examines) but Max Beerbohm (whom he doesn’t). One is seldom in doubt about the object of Swift’s satire. He may be savage but he’s not vague when proposing we dine on Irish babies, while Beerbohm’s touch is as soft as an Irish baby’s bottom.

Here’s a title Beerbohm would have loved: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. In its April 1920 issue, the American academic Harold Newcomb Hillebrand published an appreciative essay about him, drumming up American enthusiasm for the writer he calls “the most completely artistic of all the English literati.” Beerbohm, he writes, found the world “hopelessly unfathomable”:

“This not uncommon kind of skepticism may lead to indifference, to uncertainty, to impatience, to despair according to temperament; in Beerbohm it induces a contentment with things as they are and an impatience of the popular longing to improve them. One has the feeling that to him life is not much--pas grand’ chose; the expression is one of which he is fond. In the hurly-burly of life not much is of importance, and most of it is the stuff that dreams are made of, but it is none the less amusing, even fascinating, while it is being acted before us.”

Like Santayana, Enright and many sane men and women, Beerbohm was one of life’s happy spectators, with little or no wish to meddle. He possessed few of the illusions the rest of us cherish. Rather, he possessed life’s most valuable gift, “the comic view.”