'To Seem to Write with Ease and Delight'

“To seem to write with ease and delight is one of the duties which a writer owes to his readers, to his art. And to contrive that effect involves very great skill and care; it is a matter of technique, a matter of construction partly, and partly of choice of words and cadences.” 

The operative word, the one on which the entire passage and subsequent sentences hinge, is that simple monosyllable seem. In the vernacular, Beerbohm is saying “Don’t sweat it.” Don’t appear to be laboring. Make it look easy, “contrive that effect.” In a word, artifice. Readers don’t care if you find writing difficult. Don’t make it look difficult. Complain too much and they’ll drop you like a bad date.

 

Beerbohm served as the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910 – “the only regular job he ever held,” according to his biographer N. John Hall. He made a point of saying he was unqualified to review theater performances, and titled his first regular review “Why I Ought Not to Have Become a Dramatic Critic.” The passage quoted above is drawn from his final column. He wrote more than five-hundred reviews, some of which were collected in Around Theatres (1930). The appearance of “ease and delight” is always present in Beerbohm’s prose, critical and otherwise – a quality he shares with P.G. Wodehouse. There are other writerly virtues but for some of us delight ranks highest.

 

Caliban in Act III, Scene 2 of The Tempest says to Stephano and Trinculo: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” Beerbohm reviewed a production of The Tempest in November 1903.

 

“Here, one might say is the least Shakespearean of all Shakespeare plays. For what is the salient thing about Shakespeare? Surely, the careless exuberance, the headlong impatience, of his art. Like the age in which he wrote, he was essentially young. In heat of his creative power, he cared not at all—could not pause to bother—how he expressed himself. Everything came out anyhow, short by blind and irresistible impulse.”